Intel's Purchase of McAfee Baffles Analysts

Intel agreed to buy McAfee for $7.68 billion today, leaving analysts slack-jawed with disbelief. “I would love to be wrong, but I think we may all look back five years from now and say, 'Wow. That was a big mistake,’” one Forrester analyst tells PC World, while another joked that it was “a lot like a horseless-carriage vendor buying a leading supplier of buggy-whips.”

“You're paying $7 billion for an AV company, which is crazy because there are 80 of them and they all do the same thing,” said an IT-Harvest analyst, though he noted that Intel may be after McAfee’s access to government contracts. And Richard Stiennon of Forbes writes, “This is the biggest acquisition of a pure play security company ever. It’s also the worst. There is no synergy, no channel benefits, no new markets ... and no meaningful strategy.” (More Intel stories.)