Why going private won't save Dell or BlackBerry
Covering tech these days can be a lot like watching an episode of "The Walking Dead." Zombie companies stagger around, taking bites out of panicked shareholders and about-to-be fired employees. In the cases of Dell and BlackBerry, it wasn't an unexplained burst of interstellar radiation that's responsible, of course -- it was the iPhone and the subsequent mobile revolution that neither company grasped in time.
This week, a company that's been a zombie for years finally admitted it. BlackBerry fired nearly half its staff and moved to go private, echoing a tactic that another victim of the mobile revolution made this month after a long fight: Dell.
Sorry to say, chances are neither company will return to the land of the corporate living, though Dell has the better shot. Going private is a slick trick that makes a few people really rich and buys some time, but does little to solve the fundamental problems that turned their companies into flesh eaters.
