David Crane laughs at Microsoft's acquisition of his Activision for $ 68.7 billion
It all started with some tweets from the youtuber Rees, specialized in retrogaming, who wrote: "It makes you smile to think about what the founders (David Crane, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead and Jim Levy Ed) would have thought in 1979 if they had been told that their company would one day be bought for nearly $ 70 billion, none other than the Altair BASIC developers. "
David Crane quoted it and then began to tell: "HAHA! @ctrl_alt_rees has reached a very good point on the acquisition. Activision and Microsoft were both founded in the second half of the 70s, one by four game designers of proven skill, the other from two techies who developed and sold BASIC.The value of both companies was close to zero.
We knew Microsoft. Our last project within Atari was the operating system of the Atari 400/800 computers. Microsoft signed a contract to develop BASIC for the 1800s, but didn't honor it (too busy with IBM?). One of Alan Miller's last official decisions at Atari was to replace her because he hadn't delivered the project.
Given the expectations on the growth of video games, it was possible to imagine that in the future Activision could be bought for billions of dollars, but if you had told you that little Microsoft would have paid 68 billion dollars, we would have taken you for crazy. "
Of course Crane has been out of Activision for years and has no say in the acquisition. However his point of view is interesting, at least to understand the path taken by Microsoft and Activision to arrive at a bargain. like that.
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