A lot of pretty bad misinformation here. Some relevant facts:
1) Regardless of past history, everything in the computer business is in the now. Really good companies become sucky companies and then [possibly] come back again. As an airline once said:"we have to earn our wings every day".
2) McAffee antivirus etc. is probably the only well-known program in the antivirus/antimalware industry that can make Norton/Symantec's crap look good by comparison. These two are dinosaurs of the industry that duke it out while IT pros laugh at both of them. They are overpriced and underperforming and overhead-ridden needlessly. The little companies like aVast! that are winning that war, and that includes companies many people have never heard of such as SuperAntiSpyware and MalwareBytes. In fact, the cheesy names causes another problem: fake antimalware programs that to an ***** are indistinguishable from the small white-hat companies so the gen-pop downloads more malware claiming to be anti-malware, etc.
3) Any reputation that anything or anyone named McAfee or Norton/Symantec whatever has no reputation as these are no longer the original programs; today they are big businesses who buy up small operations just to plunder them.
Anyone remember IBM AntiVirus? It had problems only because it was not well-managed, didn't have a realistic way to get updated, and largely a limitation of the times when the Internet was underused and largely unusable due to insufficient bandwidth to get the updates out to users. That process evolved for all such that for the most part, you can just assume programs perform their own updates; you have a right to those expectations.
But the point is this: IBM's program [well, they also bought some little guy out actually] had a novel feature: A concept of a faster way to know that most of your files are secure: If this is the first time a file is encountered, it needs the full treatment of course. But after the first time, all you need is a way to prove that the file is UNCHANGED since it was last tested [unless of course the database is radically different; refinements obviously had to be developed to know what was sufficient upgrade of the database or not, etc. In any case, all secondary scans were radically faster because there is a way to do small samples of a file by some encrypted method to prove that a file is unchanged a whole lot faster than checking it thoroughly, thus, the secondary scans were dramatically better.
Why mention this? Because while Mcafee didn't get their hands on this gem as bumbling IBM was starting to sell off most of their assets [they are a very different company now, and arguably the worse off for that whole set of changes], Symantec did. They then hyped up the fact that they indeed did buy it, and made the brazen lying claim that the "best parts" of it were being added to the Norton product. Except of course, that never happened; they merely buried a superior competitor's product to mediocritize the entire industry. Without that innovative leader, they all could have a crappier product and get away with it.
Now of course, today they are both irrelevant, you can get better performance anywhere else, but you can't pay more for it [that's almost a famous putdown of IBM: You can get better anywhere else, but you can't pay more.]
So, that Mcafee's directly owned company might have had a product that some liked and smaller numbers that could defend it technically against competitors is beyond irrelevant. Today, this man is a figurehead trading on his company name; bring it out by all means, and if it works and Obama doesn't block it, fine. Just don't muddy the waters here; the more you think some old-guard company WAS good in this somewhat sleazy business, the more it doesn't matter.
Also, another point: It seems that much of the way anti-malware programs work is they "somehow" get the inside dope on what the bad hats are doing. I suggest they pay snitches, especially in eastern Europe. anyone remember RAV? Seems Microsoft bought it out just to shut it down. All these big companies are the same theme, level the playing field downward so they can sell more, true innovation is to be ridiculed. Some of the tinier white-hat companies are less than 3 people total [and that includes the web designer].