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Rumour has just emerged that Rare wasn't the only target when Microsoft sat down with a shed-load of cash and a hunting rifle.

According to senior gossipers in the UK today, Microsoft has been in discussions with Capcom in Japan with the intention of buying the company. The talk arrives on the back of a set of shaky financials for Capcom, where the Japanese giant wrote off approximately £70 million in the past year on scaling down company assets.

Capcom is the latest company rumoured to be targeted by Microsoft in recent weeks, after the American behemoth finally admitted it had bought Rare for the "bargain" price of £240 million.

Current talk is also pinning Sega as a possible buyout opportunity for Microsoft, although chatter on the subject has slowed in the last week.

The talk of Capcom going under the hammer has yet to be substantiated by any sources involved in possible talks. According to Japanese insiders, only two other Xbox games from Capcom have yet to be announced, one of which is a driving title.
The main focus for the Capcom, despite the shifting of Resident Evil to Nintendo hardware, firmly remains PlayStation 2.

More on this in the coming weeks. Feel the power of Microsoft's cash.

News source: computerandvideogames.com

"I frankly think that Celera is still the company that mapped the human genome," says Caroline Kovac, general manager of IBM Life Sciences. "It is a company that is extremely well-positioned, having done that, to incorporate genomics into the drug discovery process."

Still, the way Celera chose IBM illustrates the Rockville, Md.-based genomics firm's growing pains. When Celera signed up Compaq in 1998, the company put a great deal of importance on the ability of various supercomputing systems to run a single gene-mapping program. Now, says John Reynders, vice president of informatics at Celera, it has much more diverse computing needs. "The constellation of things that we're doing is very rich," he says.

Among the factors that made IBM and EMC Celera's top choice is IBM's experience migrating data from old systems to new ones. Another factor is that IBM will have to integrate two firms. Celera and Applied Biosystems are both tracking stocks for a larger corporation called Applera. Lately, Applied has taken over Celera's original business, selling gene-sequence subscriptions to drug companies, while Celera focuses on developing its own products.

An issue that also may have played a role in Celera's decision: Now that Compaq has been acquired by Hewlett-Packard, it is in flux. To add more questions, Compaq will at some point start outsourcing chip design to Intel. "I think there's no question that there is no Compaq anymore, and Compaq has issues with the chip, HP has issues with the platform," says Kovac. "But it's not as if Celera didn't have other choices."

The question for Celera, however, is not merely whether it made the right choice in picking IBM. Even with its rich cash position, the company needs a real line of revenue-producing products. And it needs to develop them as quickly as possible.