The ride is winding down. After a year during which investors first gave BlackBerry another chance, then threw up their hands, shares have plunged again, this time on the news that the company expects to report nearly $1 billion in losses during the second quarter.

The once-reigning master of mobile messaging also plans to lay off 4,500 employees, or more than one-third of its workforce.

BlackBerry shares finished the day down more than 17 percent on the NASDAQ, heading back toward the lows seen nearly a year ago. Optimists were hopeful that the long-delayed BlackBerry 10 OS might at least help the company regain a hold on the businesses of world, which have traditionally gravitated towards the software tools that let them secure and manage phones used across a large organization.

Instead, the company ran headlong into the bring-your-own-device wave. Corporate America realized that employees were using their own devices (read: iPhones and Android devices) for work anyway. Rather than fight their own workers every step of the way, businesses decided to figure out how to incorporate those devices into their own workflow. Large organizations regained some centralized control they had lost, while workers were happier and more productive.

Those productivity gains might have had something to do with the fact that their iPhones and Android devices were more effective than the handsets the dysfunctional BlackBerry was making.

The launch of the new iPhones today must make BlackBerry's bad news all the more stinging for company employees, executives, and any shareholders still hanging on. But the story of the company's decline is nearly as old as the iPhone itself. The best the company can likely hope for is a Nokia-style takeover, though who would actually take over is tough to imagine.

The other possibility is that a leaner BlackBerry will abandon the consumer market once and for all and get rigorous about becoming a niche company focused on a particular customer – one that needs security, control, and a few particular tasks done remarkably well, possibly even as a software rather than a hardware company. Now that the iPhone has gone gold, maybe BlackBerry could remake itself as stainless steel – not as valuable a metal, but strong, polished, and incorruptible.