Intel-McAfee: Horseless Carriage Vendor Buys Buggy-Whips | Forrester Blogs

Intel-McAfee: Horseless Carriage Vendor Buys Buggy-Whips Forrester Blogs: "Intel doesn’t understand software. Perhaps the most troubling part of the McAfee deal is the prospect that they will mismanage their new division into irrelevance. Intel’s track record with deals further up the stack are patchy at best. In 2005, Intel bought Sarvega, a hardware-and-software play in the XML processing segment. Today, it is irrelevant. In 1991, Intel bought LANDesk as the centerpiece of its DMTF strategy. Remember what DMTF stood for? (No penalty for not remembering: it stands for Desktop Management Task Force.) LANDesk was sold at the height of the dot-com boom, and it has been bought, spun off or sold three times again. Now Intel wants to get back in the software game again. Again, how will this be any different?"
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Contrast that with the highly sandboxed, compartmentalized, digitally signed “apps” model of the BlackBerry OS and Apple’s iOS. With these two operating systems, you don’t need on-board anti-virus, or HIPS, or anything else — and if you do, it is because Apple or RIM have screwed up. Both of these vendors are taking responsibility for their platforms in totality in ways that Microsoft never did, or could have. Neither iOS or BlackBerry OS depend in any way on hardware capabilities Intel or anybody else could bring to the table, other than the root-of-trust embedded in the handset. All of the security differentiation is in the OS. And that, frankly, is where it belongs.