BlackBerry Maker Slashes 2K Jobs

Research In Motion, the company that makes BlackBerry phones and tablets, is deleting about 2,000 names from its employee email list. The company announced it will cut the jobs—about 11% of its workforce—and reorganize its executives in order to better compete with Apple's iPhone and Google's Droid, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The Canadian firm will now employ about 17,000, after reporting a 12% drop in quarterly revenue, but RIM says the layoffs are due to overestimating how many workers it needed following a boom in product popularity. A company statement reads, "[The layoffs are] believed to be a prudent and necessary step for the long-term success of the company and... [follow] an extended period of rapid growth within the company whereby the workforce had nearly quadrupled in the last five years alone." However, some insiders see the move as a symptom of a greater problem for RIM. "What the company must do is lay out a concise, detailed plan to instill confidence in the market," writes ZDNet's James Kendrick. "Lately it seems to be floundering, so it’s not clear if the company can even do this." (More BlackBerry stories.)