FOR months Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian maker of BlackBerry smartphones, has seemed incapable of getting anything right. Its PlayBook tablet went on sale without e-mail (unless attached to a BlackBerry). Its network was blacked out for days with scarcely a word from the company. It has been slow to upgrade BlackBerry’s operating system. Investors squealed as the share price fell by 70% in ten months. Canadians are now worried they might lose a second technology champion within a few years.Ever louder calls for a change in leadership were answered on January 22nd, when RIM’s joint chief executives and chairmen, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, stepped down. Investors doubt the new chief executive, Thorsten Heins, a former chief operating officer, will stop the rot. On January 23rd the share price fell by 9%.Perhaps that is because RIM sees little rot to stop. Mr Heins was anointed by Messrs Balsillie and Laziridis, who are still on the board. “I don’t think there is some drastic change needed,” he told analysts this week—certainly not a break-up of RIM, an idea some disgruntled shareholders want to consider. His boldest step will be to find a new chief marketing officer.But rot there is. Fewer and fewer companies insist that their staff use BlackBerrys. ComScore, a research firm, says that last autumn only a sixth of American smartphone-users brandished RIM’s…

Original post by The Economist: Business