First of all, here’s my opinion about the two companies. Intel is a top technology company mainly creating the best, and most sold, processors in the world. It is by far the best in its field, and light years ahead of competition. Now McAfee is a company creating viruses that will infect your PC, and then updating its garbage software to erase those viruses. The anti-virus software that it creates consists of a spyware application that will monitor your PC, and will make it impossible for you to install a lot of applications. Not to mention, of course, that sometimes this anti-virus crashes, and will make your PC unbootable (I’m talking about real life example here). People are duped into thinking that this anti-virus software is the solution, not the problem, and that nuclear proof computer viruses are being created by 15 year olds, sitting in their parents’ basement, and not at the headquarters of an anti-virus company to make you buy the software.

Now that the world knows my opinion about both companies, let’s examine the main reason of why Intel bought McAfee at 60% premium. Apparently Intel wants to embed the software directly on its chips, which for me (someone knowledgeable about both software and hardware) is one of the craziest ideas ever. If they are going to do this, then why not buy Microsoft, and embed their Windows application directly on the chip.

McAfee is a software, and depends on the operating system to run, and there’s a large variety out there, with different service packs. I suspect Intel will just disable the hardware anti-virus feature if the OS is not compatible. But installing a software on the hardware is, in my opinion, a bad idea, as you just can’t get rid of this thing, and whether Intel admits this or not, this will create overhead on the processing power, and may very well lead to crashes. Then again, I’m sure that the Intel people did their homework properly before venturing into this.

Now why would you need another anti-virus if one is now provided in 80% (Intel’s share) of the processors? Most probably you don’t, which is something will kill the competition (I see lawsuits building up, watch up INTC).

Apparently, it’s not only me who’s not convinced with this, most Intel investors aren’t, that’s why INTC dropped 3.22% today. MFE went up almost 60%.

Now this deal created a rumor that Symantec may be targeted next, which caused a trading activity 5 times the normal volume, and the stock ended up closing 6.2% higher, at $13.37. To all the suckers who bought SYMC today: who’s going to buy this company, AMD? I’m sure they’d love to, but seeing how AMD’s market capitalization is worth 40% of that of Symantec’s, I don’t think it’ll be the case. Or maybe Apple? But when was the last time Apple acquired a company (actually forget about it, Steve Jobs will never buy such a company, not in a million years).

Let’s list the suckers, in order of insanity:

– Intel
– People who bought SYMC today and did not sell it today to make a profit
– People who bought MFE in the morning at $47.30
– People who buy McAfee or Symantec anti-virus software, to get rid of the viruses that these companies created in the first place

A quick note to Intel, people hate spyware on their hard disk, and I can assure you they’ll hate it more when it’s on their processor.