Ten weeks into his tenure as Research in Motion CEO, Thorsten Heins is now readying the axe. “It’s now very clear to me that substantial change is what RIM needs,” Heins said in a conference call and webcast with investors late on March 29. As a result, he says has begun a massive restructuring of the smartphone and mobile device maker.

Part of that change includes cleaning house—a group of executives, including former co-CEO Jim Balsillie, have resigned or retired as the company prepared its financial results. (RIM took a loss of $125 million for its fourth quarter, which just ended—compared to a $934 million profit a year ago.) More may soon be swept out as Heins makes changes, and seeks to sell off or shut down parts of the business that don't mesh with his vision of a newer, leaner RIM. “We see that Blackberry can not succeed if we try to be everybody's darling and all things to all people,” Heins said.

Heins admitted the company was severely challenged on a number of fronts. The lack of an LTE-capable phone has hurt the company's market share relative to Android, and the company has not had enough success driving existing customers to upgrade to the Blackberry 7 platform. Sales of the “full touch” Blackberry Torch line have not been growing at the same speed as the rest of the touch-screen phone market. And although the Playbook “now has over a million customers,” Heins announced, it's well behind the performance of even individual Android tablet brands.

Heins said that mobile carriers still have a “strong desire” to continue to offer Blackberry products. But he noted that RIM's late arrival to the “bring your own device movement”—and the tablet market in particular—had hurt the company with its core enterprise customers. “We saw a significant slowdown in our enterprise subscriber rate as a result,” he said. To regain enterprise market share, Heins said the company will do more to push its Blackberry Mobile Fusion management software, which offers mobile device management and security for Blackberry, Apple iOS, and Android devices, as well as subsidizing phone upgrades to Blackberry 7 devices. The upcoming Blackberry 10 platform, with a user interface similar to that of the Blackberry Playbook OS, will be introduced on LTE-capable Blackberry devices, he said.

Heins also said that RIM is looking at how to back away from its efforts to build a consumer-focused services business—the goal behind the acquisition last year of companies such as cloud-based video editing software company JayCut , cloud calendar management service Tungle, and social media and content services company NewBay. During his review of the company, he said “it became clear to me that it would be difficult to build a profitable(consumer) value added services business at this time.”

Content delivery services were specifically singled out by Heins as being a bad match for RIM's strengths, and he said that the company would instead look to form partnerships with companies “in areas that are not core to the business.” Instead, the company will focus on integrated services, such as Blackberry Messaging, security and device management.

The company also revealed the financial blow it absorbed from the October Blackberry e-mail service outage. The crash cost RIM $54 million, according to the company—though, as ZDNet's Zach Whittaker pointed out, this doesn't reflect the loss of market share and drop in the company's value that could be attributed to customers dropping RIM as a result of the service interruption.