Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, founders and co-CEOs of Research In Motion, the company that produces the famous BlackBerry, have resigned their resignations. In their place Thorsten Heins (photo courtesy of Research In Motion. Unauthorized use is not permitted) was named on the recommendation by Balsillie and Lazaridis.

Mike Lazaridis has become vice president of the board while Jim Balsillie remains among the members of the board of directors. Barbara Stymiest, who in this change of leadership has been appointed chairman of the board of directors of which she was already part since 2007, expressed her confidence in the new CEO.

Thorsten Heins is 54 years old and has been working for RIM since 2007 in various positions, now faces the problems of the company that produces the BlackBerry, whose global share of the smartphone market declined to 11%, 14.9% in the USA, after being the dominant product only a few years ago, when the BlackBerry seemed an essential device for professionals. The competition from Android and Apple iOS has become stronger and stronger and the last months have been difficult for RIM, with an outage in their services for tens of millions of users in October 2011 and in particular a decline in the shares value.

Lately there have even been rumors of a possible acquisition of RIM by Microsoft and Nokia, now closely linked in their operations in the field of mobile devices, but also by Amazon. Another possibility recently emerged is to sign agreements on the licensing of the new BlackBerry OS 10 operating system and in this case the possible buyers mentioned are Samsung and HTC.

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Now we have to see what choices the new CEO Thorsten Heins will make. Beyond the typical expressions of the press releases there are the problems of a company that must convince its users to keep on using its BlackBerry. Blackberry OS 10 should be available in the second half of 2012 and despite the optimistic statements by Thorsten Heins it might come too late to stop the decline of RIM.