Advice like don't smoke, eat healthy, and exercise regularly is so much more useful and cheaper.

Their 'product' is only useful to those doing research. Can Complete Genomics attribute meaning to this data on a large scale and then apply it to direct practical effect and profit from that ? To do that they would have to be an entirely different business.

So the question then would be, is there any real medical/clinical purpose for sequencing the massive numbers of people they would need to in order to make a profit. The IT scale challenge has been done by others before, no real challenge there. But as a business it smells of the dot com years and hype.

Is this really all about the idea and not the opportunity, been there, done that ?

It's even worse for the future. A person only needs their genome sequenced once, and yet Complete Genomics is planning to charge people a fraction of the price they'd be willing to pay for items that wear out, like cars. If every American gets their genome sequenced once per lifetime, you'd sequence about 300 million genomes every 80 years, which at $500 each, is about $1.8 billion per year. That's about the same size as the lawn care industry.

The contents of one's genome may be a life-and-death affair; I'd expect people to be willing to pay more for their health than they would for a 1-week vacation in Aruba. I'm not proposing that prices should stay high forever, just because your health is important. Vaccines are a treatment you only need once to save your life, and they only cost tens of dollars. I just think that until competition drives the prices down, the market would be willing to bear a lot more.