so... instead of paying BILLIONS to buyout LIFE or ILMN why wouldn't they pay say 1 Billion to buyout PACB and have that be their 'unit' instead of starting from scratch, particularly if PacBio's tech is said to be even better than LIFE and ILMN?
seems like a no-brainer. what am I missing here???
It is because PacBio machines are for a totally different kind of applications. They have super long reads, but low capacity (relatively). So they are not used for whole large genome sequencing. They are used for targeted sequencing and very small genomes (like bacteria). The big money will be in clinical sequencing of human whole genomes and Illumina owns that.