It's all action now where it was torpor before. It seems that BlackBerry is in such a rush to conclude a sale that it will go to auction now rather than follow the traditional industry sales route that would have taken rather longer to come to fruition but may have resulted in a better price. Auctions are fraught with danger (there is no guarantee that anyone will bid and, if anyone does but fails to beat the reserve price, than what?) and if this is the best "strategic alternatives to enhance value" the board could come up with it yet demonstrates a pathetic paucity of imagination.

That said, no doubt there will be bidders, The Chinese handset manufacturers Huawei and Lenovo are known to be interested and, who knows, perhaps even Microsoft could spend a bit more small change on another acquisition.

On the outer fringes of this debacle there are some who think that part of BlackBerry can still survive in one form or another. Bert Nordberg, late of Sony Ericsson and now a BlackBerry board member, reckons the rump might continue to exist as a "niche company" in smartphones.

It is thought that the company is considering breaking itself up into several "subset" constituent parts sto parlay its expertise in device security (on which it has spent a lot of money), hardware functionality, and enterprise business. It is already known that the company is very interested in spinning-off its popular BlackBerry Messenger service.

The big question to be asked of BlackBerry's precipitate determination to rush through its sale in a matter of a few weeks is this: if the company's own board is so determined to engineer a sale with such unseemly haste, what kind of a message does that send? One of desperation I would suggest. Why would anyone stump up top dollar for something the current owners obviusly place such little value on?

Meanwhile, BlackBerry board member Bert Norberg but has opined that it would "be a challenge" for and 'new' BlackBerry to compete with Apple and Google. I know, I know...