(re: Ken, questions about “Public” Sierra) Sierra was acquired by another company that was also public – CUC. At the time of the acquisition, all of the shares of Sierra were bought by CUC, and Sierra stopped trading as a public company. All Sierra shareholders gave up their stock. If there is still any Sierra stock out there floating around – my guess is that it would be worthless.
CUC itself was acquired about a year after they bought Sierra, by a company called HFS. All CUC shares were traded for HFS shares, and CUC shares stopped trading. HFS renamed itself Cendant, and swapped all the outstanding HFS shares for Cendant shares.
About six months after this, it was discovered that CUC had been cooking their books for years, and that someone(s) in their senior management was crooked. Criminal investigations, and prosecution, are ongoing.
About a year after all this, Cendant sold off the software business to a company called Vivendi, which owns Universal. Today, the only way to own stock in Sierra is to buy stock in Vivendi – which is a giant conglomerate. Sierra represents under 1% of their sales.
Part of Sierra’s problem was that it was acquired by a crooked company – who mismanaged it – and, it has never recovered. No one would would have dealt with CUC had they suspected that anything illegal was going on. Not HFS nor Sierra. Unfortunately, bad guys exist not only in computer games, and innocent people get hurt (in this case Sierra’s employees, shareholders and customers).
-Ken Williams
