Shares in BlackBerry Ltd. have surged since the troubled firm was reported August 9 to be flirting with going private. That prospect was given credence with BlackBerry’s announcement three days later that it is indeed thinking of putting itself up for sale.

That has been a windfall for day traders, perhaps. But in going private through a sale to private equity firms and pension funds, BlackBerry will have locked in about $80 billion in share-value destruction. At its 2008 peak, BlackBerry was worth about $84 billion. BlackBerry will have only the late Nortel Networks Corp. outranking it in perpetrating mammoth investor losses.

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Here’s what BlackBerry had to say for itself in a Monday statement by director Timothy Dattels: “Given the importance and strength of our technology, and the evolving industry and competitive landscape, we believe that now is the right time to explore strategic alternatives.”

Translation: Our ballyhooed turnaround strategy, unveiled less than a year ago, is already marked for failure. If we take refuge in private ownership, we can do a yard sale of assets outside the unflattering glare of publicity. Maybe we can squeeze some residual value out of this rotting lemon — as the equally hapless Nortel did — by selling our patents trove, our services operation and everything else that remains, until we’ve well and truly gone out of business.

After firing about 5,000 workers last year to cut $1 billion from its operating costs, BlackBerry still managed to spill a wholly unexpected $84 million in red ink in its latest quarter. And it’s projecting a further loss in the current quarter, after its make-or-break BlackBerry 10 flopped.

BlackBerry’s once lofty market share has plunged to a negligible 3 per cent. And its once-dominant operating system is soon to be eclipsed as the third-place player by Windows Phone, which is even later to the smartphone party than BlackBerry archrivals Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

It’s galling for long-suffering BlackBerry investors to hear Monday that the Waterloo, Ont. firm is seeking a way out of its identity crisis. The company has already been doing that, presumably, since last year, when it hired two high-powered investment banks to advise it on burial plans as an independent, publicly traded company.

Going private is for troubled sofa makers, not growth companies, and especially not tech firms. Going private means no more honey pot of publicly traded shares with upside potential for attracting and retaining top talent. It means forsaking the cheapest source of capital for R&D, marketing and geographic expansion. Heck, it means going without the money required to hang on to what remains of BlackBerry’s rapidly declining market share from Tokyo to Boston.

If private equity firms and pension funds, as realistically speculated, are induced to take complete ownership of BlackBerry, they will be obsessed with protecting their investment. That rules out the costly, risky spending required to breathe new life into a company that by default became Canada’s tech flagship after Nortel’s demise.

As it happens, the BB 10 garnered generally positive reviews from unforgiving tech critics.

Yet the product wouldn’t move because someone in Waterloo forgot to tell the world about BlackBerry’s best-in-class keyboard, greatly upgraded operating system, and unmatched security.

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BlackBerry could not have hoped for better than the serendipity of the BB 10’s launch coinciding with the current scare over privacy invasion in the company’s key U.S. market.

But BlackBerry has a knack for not missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. It has clung to its sluggard marketing even as a suddenly vulnerable Apple has been humbled by questions about its post-Steve Jobs leadership, its new-product drought, and its shocking decision to “dividend” its enormous cash pile rather than invest in another string of must-have iPods, iPhones and iPads.

Those are the favourable conditions in which BlackBerry’s decline has continued apace.

For a small country, Canada has quite a legacy of epic implosions of one-time world beaters, including Massey-Ferguson Ltd., Seagram Ltd. and Olympia & York Developments Ltd. Nortel made the Internet possible with its persistent faith in fibreoptics, dating from the 1970s. Yet Nortel and smartphone trailblazer BlackBerry have managed between them to destroy about half a trillion dollars in shareholder value. BlackBerry is currently worth about half the value of smoothie vendor Tim Hortons Inc. or Lululemon Athletica Inc., the yoga togs maker.

The former Research in Motion Ltd. has changed its CEO, its name, and the operating system of its devices. It’s now poised to change its ownership status rather than just liquidate and call it a day. As with the decade-long death throes of Nortel, the issue with BlackBerry is how can we mourn it when it won’t go away?

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