Bangalore: As Apple and Android war over dominance of the mobile world, RIM has been witnessing a slew of changes. Thorsten Heins, a German physicist was made the firm’s CEO last week after Mihalis Lazaridis stepped down, but even before that, RIM announced a delay in its release of Blackberry’s latest model- the BlackBerry 10.

The BlackBerry 10 was predicted as the model that would bridge the gap between RIM and its competitors because it ran on a faster more powerful processor, and its delay was a significant blow. RIM’s new CEO, however, is taking the downward spiral of the company as a challenge. The Globe and Mail reported him telling employees last week “This is what I will really focus on ... that we get better at execution.” Heins reportedly said in the past that RIM will not take the quick solutions suggested which include breaking up the company, perhaps getting rid of the handset business to focus on software and services, or even selling it. “We are going to do this ourselves,” he said.

But it doesn’t help that RIM’s long slide downwards has talented new recruits considering other companies better than the mobile giant. “It was definitely a really great place to have your first internship, but you don’t see a lot of the strong students ending up wanting to go to RIM full time, which is sad”, said Ziyad Mir, a 20-year-old intern at LinkedIn reported the Globe and Mail.

Now Heins need to convince not only prospective interns and existing employees, but also woo consumers, outside developers, and wireless carriers (such as AT&T) with proof of BlackBerry’s worth.

With outside developers (who incidentally are a big reason for Apple’s success), Heins now needs to push into the investigation of how to make BlackBerry a feasible platform, and remove the obstacles that hinder developers from creating apps for it. Since Blackberry was created a long time before the iOS came into existence, one of the problems that will surface is that the platform was never designed to make room for apps. BlackBerry is available in a number of forms, processing power, and interfaces—something that could be dealt with in Blackberry 10. According to the Globe and Mail’s report, RIM could do this by simplifying the tools required to develop apps for the platform, and modify it so the apps will work over the number of devices running on RIM.

But Heins is keeping his head up, and fighting it out positively.  On the first day as RIM’s CEO, he encouraged employees “…Keep your head up – 54 per cent growth, never a quarter without profits, BlackBerry subscriber base grown by 35 per cent year over year ... Yes, there is a region [the United States] where we have to get into fighting mode, and we will, but this is a global play, guys. Be proud of where we are.”