Tough times for Blackberry maker Research in Motion

Things just keep getting worse for Research in Motion, the makers of BlackBerry devices. RIM revealed it lost three of its top leaders and also turned in poor results during the fourth quarter of 2011.

Jim Balsillie, one of RIM’s co-founders, resigned from the company’s board. Leaving with Balsillie are also RIM’s chief technology and chief operating officers, David Yach and Jim Rowan.

Besides the personnel losses, the company also posted a drop in revenue. RIM brought in $4.2 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter, a 19% drop from its revenue in in the third quarter.

Adding insult to injury, the company also revealed a four-day outage in October that affected more than half of its 70 million users, costing the company $54 million, according to ZDNet.

The one positive spin the Canadian tech company could put to the results were signs that it is taking it as an opportunity to clean out its closet.

Chief Executive Thorsten Heins said the company is going to refocus on going after the enterprise market, Bloomberg reported.

“We will strongly invest in enterprise, industrial design, high-end aspirational devices,” he said. “BlackBerry cannot succeed if we try to be everybody’s darling and all things to all people.”

Heins said substantial changes are necessary to change RIM’s trajectory. Heins said he would consider selling the company, and he also said he was open to the idea of licensing out BlackBerry 10, the company’s upcoming operating system for both phones and tablets.

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Original source: RIM lost $54 million on four-day global BlackBerry outage

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