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Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are stepping down at a time when investors wonder whether RIM has the ability to compete in the rapidly changing markets for smartphones.

A person uses the new Blackberry Bold 9900 at a release party to promote the BlackBerry OS 7 devices made by RIM in Toronto LONDON - BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were suffering a second day of problems on Tuesday, just hours after Research In Motion Ltd, maker of the devices, said it had fixed a huge outage.

RIM (Research in Motion), makers of BlackBerry, announced some new management changes and job cuts today, or as the company calls it, a new “cost optimization program”.

The program was actually first mentioned back in mid-June. First, the management changes.

In line with RIM's planned "cost optimization program," the company is moving a number of executives into positions of greater power and will lay off 2,000 of its estimated 19,000 person workforce.

Following first-quarter earnings that sent investors and the media into a tizzy, analyst coverage of RIM has been fairly monotone.

The consensus? The company is doomed. However, analysts at Macquarie Capital Markets paint a different picture of RIM’s business.

RIM Co-CEO's Mike Lazaridis and Jim Basillie collectively own more than 10% of the company, however, due to plummeting stock, they can no longer call themselves Billionaires.

It certainly isn't the sort of press that RIM wants: more than 900 of its brand-new BlackBerry PlayBook tablets have been recalled.

New data from comScore for this past March has pointed to Apple nearly passing RIM in smartphone market share for the US.

Shipping 18.65 million iPhones helped Apple gain half a point since December to hit 25.5 percent share in its home country.

RIM launched the BlackBerry PlayBook on Tuesday, April 19. The question remains: who will buy the unfinished device, which doesn't even have calendar, email, and contacts apps yet?

As has been long suspected, RIM has confirmed that its upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will have the ability to run both Java and Android apps.

That functionality, however, will only be available once RIM releases two "players," which will arrive in the summer.