You might not, I might not. But they do have somewhat of a reputation for not executing well on the 454 technology. It has been said that they failed to scale out what was a fundamentally sound platform. That they didn't really push on density to the increase device throughput as much as they could have.

The truth maybe that the technology just has fundamental limitations. But I'd would say that's not objectively clear.

The Illumina (Solexa) platform also had significant limitations, it took a lot of platform development to get it where it is today. In contrast Illumina have executed quite well, providing systematic improvements to the Solexa platform.