Is the Proton a good reason to buy Life Technologies stock?

[aleferna]

Let me first confess that I know I have no idea how to run a company, but engaging in these conversations even if I get a bashing like the one on top are really good learning experience. I want to thank BBoy for taking the time to respond to my many ramblings.

Some points that I want to defend:

I feel that in the last years (before ARM and the whole smartphone thing) Intel didn't get any real competition from AMD and that is precisely what left them vulnerable to ARM. Living around many people working at Intel factory, I heard rumors that they would hold back some new developments because they would make more money doing incremental steps than just throwing out the best they could make. Now, and again this is my naive perception, I felt that Intel kept AMD in business only to avoid anti-trust laws in the US. Also, I noticed that in the old times a CPU would be half as fast from one year to the other, the last time I exchanged my 3 year old computer for the top of the line i7 I didn't really see the difference even though I used the same version of Ubuntu. Yeap Intel has done A LOT, but I wonder what they would have accomplished with real competition, in that sense I called them "lazy", but of course I know there IS a reason why they never had competition, they we very very good.


"Yeah, that worked out for HP real well...": I thought it had? I honestly don't know, I just noticed that all printer makers suddenly dropped the printer costs and relied on expendables, not sure if it was a good strategy in the end but it certainly feels like nobody can compete with this strategy. I know printing is still like 20% of HP's market but that people are printing less nowadays because of email, there's also some macro-economic forces so it is really complicated to assess if the strategy worked, but I think it did keep them in the game as they would not have been competitive otherwise. Maybe if IT changes to consumables, Illumina would just do the same and they would have no gain. Still it would be really cool for us users though...

Is it me or is IT very good in creating Hype, 120k runs, but only like 300 submitted to SRA? If that is true for MiSeq, that means there are about 12M MiSeq runs no?

[aleferna]

Well, I would revise the traction of NGS if the price goes down to $100, old ideas are not necessarily bad. Turing had very bad decade old ideas that didn't get traction.

The stock market is really not were I measure a company's state. Its tough with the number of supercomputers driving artificially the price of the stock to a fibonacci number every millisecond, this has no relationship on real company progress, not anymore.

I was impressed by Illumina's decision to fend off the takeover, of buying Nextera, of responding to IT with the MiSeq.. I feel that the company is well managed. Life is too complex for me to wrap my head around.

Originally Posted by Elcannibal

Hi Aleferna, I am sorry but that vision is about 2 decades old and it's not gaining any traction. Just like ngs is not gaining ground in forensics and applied science.

Also, hope everyone sold their shares, life is officially way too expensive and that baby is slowly going to deflate.

[steinmann]

Have sold my shares for now. Not sure whether the steep increase in price is fully justified. Reports over poor quality and shorter read lengths on the proton make me skeptical.

[MrGuy]

Well, seems Thermo bought them.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/thermo...120801466.html

[adaptivegenome]

Originally Posted by MrGuy

Well, seems Thermo bought them.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/thermo...120801466.html

Haha! Well good for them! I wonder what happens to Rothberg & Co.

[MrGuy]

Maybe spun off to Roche? Or sold to Illumina?

[steinmann]

Guess my timing was not perfect but I did well enough

[victorsor]

Originally Posted by steinmann

Yes, but they should still be in the same ballpark which they are clearly not.


True, but recently released datasets show that this is not much of a problem any more.


60-80 million reads for the Proton is substantially more than the 15-17 for the MySeq. Error rates for the new chips are of course still a big unknown. Hard to say how smaller beads and a therefore weaker signal will impact data quality.

If the machine "star" of Life (not yet on the market) is only able to produce less than double output that Miseq (17 M. of reads x 500 bases= 8.5 GB this data at specifications 850 K/mm2 but actually 1000-1200 K/mm2 work well => up to 11 GB) and with a technology clearly worse: homopolymers, indels, error rate, Quality score (at least with PGM that is the machine that at today is available)... I do not know about we are talking...

[steinmann]

Originally Posted by victorsor

I do not know about we are talking...

You confuse me do too

[aleferna]

I also don't understand the comparison between the Proton and the Miseq? Isn't Proton at the HiSeq 1000 price segment? Have the prices changed, I though after server, extra stuff the Proton/Chef/support ended up at 300k?? I when we bought our MiSeq the PGM was offered to us at $150k when it was supposly $50k.

Does anybody know an updated price table for 2013?

[victorsor]

Originally Posted by aleferna

I also don't understand the comparison between the Proton and the Miseq? Isn't Proton at the HiSeq 1000 price segment? Have the prices changed, I though after server, extra stuff the Proton/Chef/support ended up at 300k?? I when we bought our MiSeq the PGM was offered to us at $150k when it was supposly $50k.

Does anybody know an updated price table for 2013?

That is the key point. If comparing Miseq with Proton (the bigger brother of PGM) both of them are similar, then implicitly it recognizes that between "personal sequencers" Miseq is much better than PGM.