Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

Let’s start with the disclaimer that I own Intel Stock. After this acquisition, which I will try to fathom as I write this post, the stock is back down below the dismal level I bought it at. When I bought the stock it was with the thinking that “it can’t go lower than this” and for a while it hasn’t. Until they overpay for a company that makes a mediocre product.

I can see geeks joking everywhere that Intel bought McAfee because the bloatware that McAfee sells is second biggest driving force for CPU upgrades after Windows. And CPU upgrades are good for business at Intel. But the real reason might just be one or more of the following

1. Diversification. Intel wants to move up from just being a hardware company, maybe?
2. Some future in-processor security mechanism. However McAfee is not a great acquisition for that purpose. They could have bought out one of the smaller players if it were just for the security aspect. A combination of 1 and 2 is more likely to be the driver.
3. They think adding McAfee will improve profitability down the line. McAfee has revenues of $2 billion and growing with margins of 80%. But I don’t see any common ground here where the acquisition will save costs. So either McAfee was seriously undervalued or the deal will bring major improvements to something Intel has in the pipeline.

As an investor I’m not exactly sure this is a good thing. It might be but I’m skeptical. I would have been much happier if they would have bought some smaller security vendor and thrown the Intel weight behind that to get people to move away from McAfee/Symantec instead. Intel spent more than half it’s cash on this deal. Maybe their headquarters being a stone’s throw away makes it easy to merge and form Intelton, CA.

Whatever it is, hopefully this foretells less malware in our future?

I logged in to my Blockbuster account today and saw this:

Blockbuster is really throwing everything and the kitchen sink to compete with Netflix and Redbox. But nothing seems to be working to keep the company alive. I’m not sure why they don’t throw in free streaming like Netflix too.

Total Access (exchanging disks in store), no delay for new movies, no extra charge for Blu-Ray none of this has worked for Blockbuster online. I’m not sure how well the kiosks are doing as compared to Redbox.

In my opinion, the problem with  Blockbuster is not that they aren’t doing enough. They are just doing it wrong. None of their offerings integrate with each other and Blockbuster just seems like a combination of separate companies held together by a bandage that is too small.

When Total Access first started, it want very well integrated with the Queue. Finally when they did integrate it with the queue, they removed features that made Total Access attractive in the first place. After blockbuster started shutting down stores and opening kiosks, they made the kiosks incompatible with total access. When Blockbuster started the streaming options after buing a streaming company, there was no option to stream some items for free like with Netflix.

The allure of free streaming from Netflix is that  alot of devices come with the ability to stream from Netflix and it is included. With Blockbuster you have to pay to stream so that is not as nice as Netflix. Of course with Blockbuster you can stream newer movies but if you are getting them in the mail anyway, why would anyone pay to stream? I just don’t get it.

I’m not a gamer so this new game feature is useless for me but this might cause a few gamefly users who also have Blockbuster to possibly consolidate into one account.

Either way I hope Blockbuster stays relevant and I hope they add total access to their Kiosks. That would really make me stay with Blockbuster for longer than I am planning now.