"The nail that sticks its head up is the one that gets hammered down." People don't usually get fired for NOT taking a chance -- but they sure do get fired if someone thinks they wasted company resources. There was an article some time ago on one of the biotech article aggregator sites about this very issue. The thrust of the article was that THIS is why Big Pharma has become so slow to develop new drugs -- everyone's afraid of taking a chance.

Anyway, it's absolutely correct to say that NO ONE knows what the timetable is for any potential deal. And those people who claim that progress is too slow, or a deal is just around the corner -- are, in the first case, ignorant, and in the second case, optimists. But they don't have any more knowledge about it than the rest of us do.