Intel wants to be inside of everything, so sayeth Bloomberg Businessweek. The PC market for chips is only so big and it's slowing, which the market for embedded chips, while smaller for now, will grow dramatically.
So Intel's purchase of MacAfee, the software security firm, is viewed as a shot across the IT's industry's bow, suggesting that cybersecurity concerns are going to move far beyond the world of computers and the internet to something far more pervasive. Thus devices with embedded chips will need embedded software on those chips and embedded security software within that software.
How you think of cybersecurity in terms of firewalls in such a world is beyond me. Cisco speaks more and more of "borderless security"--a trend that I think favors the horizontal systems of the world (like the United States) far more than the vertical ones (like China). I mean, how can a society with low social trust prevail in such a world?