Given the volume of PC sales and the way McAfee runs its operation, I imagine there must be thousands of phantom subscribers - folks who signed up once upon a time and left the software behind two or three computers ago.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
McAfee's No. 1 strength is that they have a fantastic R&D team, engineering, as well as research at the core of security: database threat management.
Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.
The whole hardware industry has experienced the phenomenon in which every time computers get cheaper, they appeal to a new set of users; every time they get more powerful, old customers upgrade.
After all, just one virus on a computer is one too many.
Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.
In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
That was the division in the hacking world: There were people who were exploring it and the people who were trying to make money from it. And, generally, you stayed away from anyone who was trying to make money from it.
If you want to do interesting software, you have to have a bunch of people do it, because the amount of software that one person can do isn't that interesting.
Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone.
Dell fills its computers with crapware, collecting fees from McAfee and other vendors to pre-install 'trial' versions.