News hit this week confirming what many people had speculated about for a while now, that BlackBerry is officially up for sale.  By forming a special committee to explore strategic alternatives, they have opened the door for partnerships, joint ventures, going private, but ultimately it is most likely that the company and its assets are for sale.  So now BlackBerry is in a pretty familiar position, too little too late.  That was the reality of the arrival of BlackBerry 10 earlier this year.  Now the company has opened the door to possibilities rather than continue down the path they’re on.  The problem is they are in the exact same situation, but on a different scale.

Now they’re faced with trying to sell BlackBerry the company, when they couldn’t even sell BlackBerry the phone.  The reasons are many, I mentioned their late underwhelming arrival to the market, but it’s also a saturated market where Android phones dominate across the scale of low-cost to high-end phones- rife with Android phones in every segment from a variety of manufacturers and on the high end with Apple phones.  Demand for new subscribers has more or less hit capacity and that’s a real problem in the industry, especially for a company like BlackBerry that would like to sell at whatever premium they can muster.  Another problem- BlackBerry’s Market cap of 5.79 Billion.  That’s going to be a very tough deal to put together.  Motorola was bought by Google back in 2011 for 12.5 Billion, an investment that they need to further recoup and they have only just recently released its first phone in that effort, the Moto X.  That deal was made when the smartphone times were good and looked like it would never stop.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins tried to play up that value by adding that the company continues to see “compelling long-terms opportunities for BlackBerry 10”, but the tone of the announcement is just the same.  I don’t have a crystal ball here but it does appear that the best BlackBerry could hope for is either sell the company or go private.  The people on the inside are doing that work to figure out their best option.  If they find a buyer, then that may be the best thing that stockholders would hope for.  I just don’t think that’s likely.  Not at that price.  If anything, the valuable technology, property would get picked up in a fire sale.  BlackBerry’s reported 70 million customers will probably just flock to its competitors anyway, so that’s a non-starter.   The other best thing that could happen is going private, a move that companies do when they want to re-organize from time to time.  This lifts the scrutiny of quarterly reports, devaluing, and negative news cycles.  It could be the kick that BlackBerry needs and perhaps should have been the strategic move they should have made many months ago.

Still, there’s a list of companies out there that are most likely engaged in or preparing to see if an acquisition makes sense to their respective businesses and under what terms that may happen.  That list includes Microsoft, Google, maybe Amazon, ZTE, Lenovo, maybe even Samsung.  With enterprise being a cornerstone of BlackBerry’s dwindling credibility, perhaps even Apple may be on that map.  It’s all speculation.  For now however it appears that the turnaround that BlackBerry had hoped for is just not going to happen.  It will go down the way Palm went down, where Ericsson succumbed to insignificance, where Motorola almost went to.  Customers nowadays demand rapid change and if you can’t do it, you’re late to the party.  That’s exactly what’s happened here and it’s a shame that the product has a loyal ardent fan base to this very day, despite some widely held opinions.  BlackBerry has squandered what was once the most dominant smartphone platform in the business by not producing innovations, while iPhones and Androids ate their lunch.  BlackBerry’s smartphone share was over 50% at one time.  That share is about 3%.  That’s life support people and to an investor, it appears that the very reputation of the name BlackBerry is done.  That affects its potential value to say the least.  It’s also not very clear how BlackBerry would re-organize, go private, and then come out the other side with a winning formula – they had that chance and it didn’t play out well.

It seems quite obvious that we are seeing the historic collapse of a once dominant company in its final death throes.  It’s an end that came quickly and is hard to believe even to this day because of BlackBerry’s once seemingly insurmountable base of enterprise and IT clients.  That’s gone now and Canada can’t be happy about this, as BlackBerry throws in the towel.    On the positive side, despite all these challenges, BlackBerry towards the end never stopped trying.  It’s an important lesson to others in the industry to watch and analyze what happened, but it seems this story repeats itself over and over in technology history.