Strange investor spend money on a company with a negative shareholder value. At least as you don't believe the 60 % goodwill in the assets really represent anything. This company is a bubble waiting to explode Get ready to pick the pieces

The Goldman Sachs view of MiSeq vs PGM seems to make sense. It won't go down well in Life especially with the difficulties this quarter. Also accurate comments about KM leaving he was very visible in the market he should not have been forced out

KM is a worthless piece of shite.

Your job is to bag him.

I read this. Life is officially over and I saw Miseq data too. Now if anyone can make a dent in HID. That company is truly dead. The world will be able to see the worst of fake promises. Growth obtained by driving your force to the ground.

So, is this how it's going to play out?

http://www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/goldman-sachs-lowers-estimates-illum...

Good lord, how do you think anyone gets to be senior management in growing companies?

Or, in this case, non-growing companies?

Good lord, how do you think anyone gets to be senior management in growing companies?

KM is GREAT at covering his arse and stealing other people's work.
He is GREAT at that......

Both KMs are worthless incompetents who should have been terminated LONG LONG ago....

Is it true that both KM's quit LIFE?

Congrats and Welcome to the ranks of ex-AB, ex-Invitrogen, ex_Lifetechers! It is quite liberating. After a few months away, you will wonder why you put up with the BS for so long. IMHO, much of the frustration on this thread stems from the fact that "Life Technologies" has a schizophrenic business model. By that I mean, it should be, and at times is, run as a health sciences company...as the name would imply... but mostly it is run as a typical consumables business. As a result, the emphasis is meeting/making numbers and not on the people or the science, much to the chagrin of R&D. Most sane Employees get fed up and leave. GL doesn't care as long as they meet the numbers. In a down economy you can do this and find replacements pretty quick. However, over time a problem develops when/where most of the people with important institutional knowledge or people who question things are gone and you are left with a bunch of newbies and sheep who can't fix sh*t. To make up for this problem, a company with this business model starts to make bigger and bigger acquisitions to fill in the gaps of its own pipeline to try to stay in-line with forward earning projections. Because there are very few people left who can properly evaluate the economic value of emerging technologies and the company has a growing reputation as an entity you don't want taking over your company, LifeTech and the ilk end up over-paying for what they purchase (case and point... buying IT even though IT doesn't own any of the IP around it's platform....Just like EMF says, "Unbelievable!!!").

I guess most people who post to this thread, see all this and wonder how much longer the company can go on as it has. My guess is...As long as money is cheap, GL & company will keep snapping up the shiny, new technologies promising to make billions down the road and hope you forget the string of failures left in its wake. For now, LIFE is good at making the market think it is a growth company... unfortunately, less and less of that growth will be organic.

Don't insult gay people by saying GL is one of them!

I am happy to say I am one of the many many AB people quitting this summer, and so happy to be done with this craziness. In a few weeks - your problem not mine!

Children, stop this at once. This is a rumor board not a complaint board. Please stick to topics.

NO ONE CARES THAT GL IS GAY

In 50 yeers,, vegetables willl alll be made of qDots

Dr. lollipop? Who is that?

Dr. Lolipop paper-milled her degree. That is truly shocking.

LIFE has such high standards for the scum they hire........

The terrible consequence of eliminating Starlight is the LIFE lost interest in quantum dots. LIFE is blaming quantum dots for perceived failure rather people making decisions.
It is really sad because quantum dots have incredible potential in capable hands.

But they never had a chance to succed with JB making the decisions.

So what kind of decisions are they allowing JB to make these days? All hat, no cattle type of guy...

Indeed there were people in Starlight doing remarkably good work. But they never had a chance to succed with JB making the decisions. His record of incompetence is staggering. At the end of the day, how much money did he spend? Enough to make the laughable IT overpayment seem like a good idea to Lucifer and the board evidently.

"Throw $700M at Starlight and they could have had a much better future in sequencing. Good job LT!"

Hey, why the complaints? This is the best leadearship $32M/year can buy.

That is too bad, Starlight worked much better than IT. Throw $700M at Starlight and they could have had a much better future in sequencing. Good job LT!

My sister dated Parveen for 3 years.

Starlight is not just "delayed". It is completely disassembled. No coming back. Ever.

SMS will come when there is a market for it.

There is a huge market for it today. Provided it could generate 100-200 base reads close to the accuracy of an Illumina HiSeq. What there isn't a market for is near-random base generators.

Ya right, like a perfectly ready starlight package is waiting to ship out. You folks live on another planet, all these groups totally decimated, even if Pac is going to die, doesn't have an inch to do with Life's future.

Life knows that a single event can disrupt anything they may invest in so there are no long term plans, oh and what about that new solid... what do you do with that POS? Has anyone got the reps to talk about the NEW and TRUE specs... how can a billion dollar company make such a huge blunder...

SMS will come when there is a market for it. PacBio is going to crash and burn. Delaying Starlight is one of the best decisions Life has made.

"then he is truly smoking some high quality chronic."

wow, flagged already. Well, at $30M + year, GL can smoke whatever he likes, till it ends, if it does.

"Also there is no more R&D at life."

So Starlight is truly dead? No single molecule system from Life forthcoming, because if GL thinks he is going to get it from IT, then he is truly smoking some high quality chronic.

I agree. I think mostly you will find ab employees who are stunned at what invitrogen brings. Also lots of invitrogen employees responding to their idiot MBA managers.

I think the biggest issue with life is they drive numbers all the way down to your very existence. Assays and PCR boxes aren't like underwear and gasoline. There is a funding cycle and projects aren't massively started and continued in a steady stream. But a stupid teenage glorified MBA doesn't know this so 'what will you do to fill that 50k that moved next quarter ? ' question is a joke. I mean come on I could write a sitcom from some of the managers talks. So lame and 10 years behind. AB has also become the biggest center of corporate lies in the industry. The mud slinging in the field is obscene. You now see scientists who are caught between legendary negative selling for a cheap tube of buffer. The image is gone. Used car salesrep never looked as bad. All these destructive actions become apparent once you step outside the box. Then you realize how obscenely disgusting life is with their staff and how they create these anxious, unhealthy, insecure and self centered employees in the chain of command. You could easily over a few years change this. What amazes me is just how clueless power has become. The more responsibility in a cv. The more clueless. You could have the same team of reps out there without any kind of management and they would do just as well if not better.

I saw my manager this week since a year. The guy looked weak, ragged and depressed. It was sad to see.

Also there is no more R&D at life.

This is without a doubt my favorite thread. Whether employees, customers or competitors, no other company seems to evoke so eviceral a response as LIFE. Why is that?

"Of course, even I can't argue that Lifetech wouldn't be better without GL.

So after all that, you think LIFE could be run better than how it's currently being run?"

Let's see the quest score indicated that less than 50% of employees would stay at Life given equal pay and benefits. And revenues are flat if not down depending on the report. I think that says it all.

2-3 resignations per week - if you are not looking do so now!!! The end of LIFE is so sweet....

Of course, even I can't argue that Lifetech wouldn't be better without GL.

So after all that, you think LIFE could be run better than how it's currently being run?

It's charming to think that there are LIFE employees out there that are still hoping for the day GL wakes up a different person, goes into HQ and announces that he's had it all wrong since he graduated from HBS.

No. What's charming is all the idiots on these boards smugly thinking that have all the answers and that they would do things better than anyone currently heading up these large companies.

Of course, even I can't argue that Lifetech wouldn't be better without GL.

It's charming to think that there are LIFE employees out there that are still hoping for the day GL wakes up a different person, goes into HQ and announces that he's had it all wrong since he graduated from HBS.

No. What's charming is all the idiots on these boards smugly thinking that have all the answers and that they would do things better than anyone currently heading up these large companies.

Of course, even I can't argue that Lifetech would be better without GL.

>>>"Way too accurate! But how long wil the US economy support the burn and cut model of staff exploitation. The investors get way too much return from the model and the pool of suckers, way too big, to not go away any time soon."

The investors get a big return from this model FOR A WHILE. And in this model when the returns slow substantially, the business is already terminal. That is alright with the investors becasue they have already moved their money on to something else at that point. Even if they left a viable business behind when they moved on, that would be ok but that is not the way the model works. The optimized return in this model really does squeeze past the point of a viable entity. The vultures really have found the way to pocket cash at the expense of human capital.

I work at Life and love my job but, it really seems that they are losing interest in the people on the floor. It's always about cost with them.

It's charming to think that there are LIFE employees out there that are still hoping for the day GL wakes up a different person, goes into HQ and announces that he's had it all wrong since he graduated from HBS.

I agree with the comment below, however, Life has GOT to start taking better care of its employees.

I work at Life and love my job but, it really seems that they are losing interest in the people on the floor. It's always about cost with them.

Bunch of wannabe armchair investment brokers on here.

It seems that the rumor mongering trolls of Biofind have been predicting this huge failure of Life for quite some time. Starting back in the IVGN/AB days and continuing up to the current times.

And...just like the doomesday seers, when it doesn't happen - more excuses are made for why it didn't occur.

Perhaps you should go back to concentrating on your day jobs and try and better yourselves rather than sit back and hope for the failure of a company that employs thousands of people.

Way too accurate! But how long wil the US economy support the burn and cut model of staff exploitation. The investors get way too much return from the model and the pool of suckers, way too big, to not go away any time soon.

Life's business model (acquisition, reduction) and it's marketing model (retail and price point) will doom it. The third fail, is the banking model for CEO and upper management. The US simply will not sustain this scenario. Think about technology and strategy, followed by proper execution. The world is discovering that big is bad, growth is not endless and humans are not always dispensable.

Just looked at their balance which is a bubble. 60 % of the assets is intangible. Normally you should write off in 5 year, or 1.2 B per year. Compared to a profit of 400 K they really have to increase profit to remove the air bubble. Banks are stupid to continue financing them. The risk is increasing all the time

Stop publications yet bloggers run free? That wouldn't make sense.

You don't see much bad data out there because when it is generated and nearing publication, LIFE stops publication via lawsuit threats.

Time to read a manual.

Oh please educate this poor soul. I find the default de novo assembly parameters are reasonable starting point for judging data quality. So:

LIFE IT E. coli data (8 runs): N75 = 1703 bp minimum contig size; 85.7% reads are non-perfect matches to assembly.

One of many GAIIx datasets I've got (similar sized genome, barcoded, 5% of a GAIIx run): N75 = 86,212 bp minimum contig size; 8.1% reads are non-perfect matches to assembly.

Where is the massage data button on the work bench?

Do tell us the details of your analysis - oh go on - please do....

Same dataset, CLC, my analysis is well over your claims. Time to read a manual.

It's actually delivering exactly what they said it would, and way way more in the hands of decent users.

So where is this data and who are these decent users? Kudos to LIFE for making their E. coli data public without registration restrictions etc., but those 8 runs on the IT to generate just over a million reads must be close to state of the art right now. LIFE must be one of the decent users. That dataset just isn't very much better than the BGI 7 run set, so BGI must also be on the list of decent users. Likewise with Edge Bio, since LIFE has certified them as a service provider.

I've assembled datasets (CLC Workbench, since there is little or no guidance out there on k-mer size for Velvet) from all these sources and have not be overly impressed. With a contig length cutoff of 200, the latest datasets generate thousands of contigs for E. coli, where nearly half are less than 1000 bases in length. The consensus sequences have gaps every 5-10 bases, since more than half the reads have insertions or deletions relative to the consensus.

If this was the first next-gen datasets the world had ever seen, they would be impressive. But state of the art today with E. coli sized genomes is being able to set your contig cutoff at 5000 bases, and easily generate contigs 20x the size the IT is generating.

"The good news is the job market is picking up and all the good performers can sing a synonmyous "F YOU" to LIFE and their 3% raises."

This year's raises were more in the 1-2% range. That's less than the inflation rate.