Vivendi are refocusing on other businesses and shedding all their entertainment businesses from the looks of things. They sold their stake in NBC Universal last year and brought another cellular carrier. It's got nothing to do with the long term viability of ActiBliz which is a tiny part of Vivendi.

Also I take it you are ignoring the fact that Activision has always brought their franchises in the past from Neversoft with Tony Hawk, to Harmonix with Guitar Hero, to Call of Duty. Plus they have Skylanders now which is huge. It remains to be seen if Kotick is bad for the company and since gamers have been saying he (and CoD) is going to lead them to ruin for years now and the company has only got bigger I doubt investors will want to get rid of him, not until he crashes and burns (if he ever does). 

Oh and he and his business partner Brian Kelly also owns a large stake in the company.

It doesn't make any sense at all for MS to buy Activision. Too much money for little return. Won't happen.

Obviously I would love it to happen, for the chance of both Call of Duty and Blizzard be destroyed in the process.

They would need to have 100% ownership of Activision for that to happen.

Anyway a COD game going exclusive would really hurt Activision financially. There goes half the sales. 

The smart thing about this is that MS would be getting money for the best selling PS3 games out there lol.

It's not worth 10 billion. Think about it, AB made about 1 billion in profit last fiscal year, and that's with massive COD sales and 10m WOW subs. If WOW and COD numbers stay at this level, it would take MS 10 years to break even, actually longer considering 40% of the COD market would be on PS. It's clear that COD has begun it's decline and it is not a smart idea to buy them now, plus MS would only get 60% of the profits. Besides, Xbox is already the preferred COD platform so I don't see it help system sales that much more. Especially when they already have a massive FPS franchise.

If M$ buys Activision, they will become the undisputed console king on the US.

I think that every hardcore fan of the franchise that plays it on PS3 and PC, would have to buy a M$ console.

I don't really see this happening. Too much investment for too little return, CoD would lose something like 30% of its current consumers assuming some people make the switch from PS3 to PC/360.

That said, Microsoft consider this just to try and destroy Sony. Force them to leave the hardware market by releasing hard and fast (tehe) with the next-gen console. What goes around comes around eh!

edit: But even if Sony lost all future Activision games, it might not be that damaging.  Probably lose some more market share to MS.  Guess we'll have to see.

Vivendi may be refocusing on "other businesses", but one has to ask why. It's not enough to just say "Vivendi are getting rid of entertainment subsidiaries, so bye Activision" - you have to provide a reason for them to actually get rid of entertainment subsidiaries.

A much more likely scenario is that they're getting rid of subsidiaries that they don't think will make them significant profit in the future.

And I assume that you mean that they have always bought their franchises (please clarify if you meant something else). As for Skylanders, the game series is nowhere near as big as you seem to think. CoD sells over 25 million a year. Skylanders has sold less than 3 million across all platforms, with the majority being on Wii. It does not, at this point, show any signs of getting bigger. If it were up around 5-6 million, then maybe there'd be reason to expect it to become big. To make matters worse, they're already starting to milk it - within about 3 months of the first game releasing, they announced the sequel. They've also got a web game in development, they've released an illustrated novel, and they've openly spoken about the idea of TV shows and movies. Meanwhile, they're mostly big as a toy series, rather than a game series.

As for owning a large stake in the company, I don't see its relevance. If you're suggesting that it's why he'll be kept on (or should be), I'll point out that owning a large stake doesn't provide any protection from being fired for mismanagement. If you're suggesting that it gives him motivation to keep its stock price going up, I'll point out that he'd be happy to ride it up as quickly as he can, and then sell when he expects it to downturn.

that would be very very interesting if true

If MS does this I think they should offer the games exclusively through Xbox Live then allow any device to have Xbox Live. Even on PSN, Android and App Store. This way MS would be sure to get as much money as possible and nobody would have to buy an Xbox to play games they already played on their PS3 etc.