The end of BlackBerry is drawing ever closer as the board of directors is in planning mode to see which road to take the company. The options available right now includes making BlackBerry more valuable, joint ventures with other companies, and selling the whole company or part of it to the highest bidder.

If you remember the past, a similar plan was in focus for BlackBerry’s future in early 2012, but that was before the BlackBerry 10 OS launched and the company was still feeling confident in its new product. Nothing came of such plans back then, but fast forward to 2013, and it seems increasingly likely something might happen this time around.

You see, BlackBerry 10 is here, BlackBerry 10 based devices are here, yet the company is still in a rut. To make matters worse, the Windows Phone platform has overtaken BlackBerry to become the third largest ecosystem behind Android and iOS. It’s not great to see a once dominant player in the smartphone market slowly becomes meaningless to consumers, but that’s consequence for not being future proof.

Whatever the board of directors chooses to do, the first rule of thumb is to never sellout to an incompetent buyer who would surely completely tarnish and destroy the BlackBerry brand. Take a look at Palm’s sale to HP and how that turned out for a huge example of what could happen in the future if BlackBerry is not careful.

By this time in the next year or two, we believe we’ll be singing “ding dong the king is dead” for a long time.

[via MarketWire]