Long shot, but has it got anything to do with real estate? Intel and McAfee HQs are located within a mile of each other...
again, its a crazy angle, just putting it out there.
Isn't it generalizing too much? Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's last theorem for 7 yrs in secret, nobody even knew he was working on it until he published the results.
Wiles is widely regarded as odd, to put it mildly, for that effort. And it still didn't work and he had to get a former student in to help fix the proof.
I agree, although life in general seems to move at a leisurely pace there, so the "urgency" factor in work is not there. OTOH, the fruit juices there do taste much better than the supermarket ones in mainland US...