Bring back products

Product-based companies have fallen out of favor over the past few years, as investors tired of the blow-ups in Phase III trials that left them holding worthless stock. They turned instead to platform companies, in part because product development would be left to others, at least for the immediate future.

As providers of technology and services, platform companies have seemed far less risky than product stories. At the same time, platform providers have been actively courted by pharmaceutical companies worried about falling behind in the combinatorial chemistry/screening/genomics/functional genomics/bioinformatics revolutions...