By many accounts, the problems at RIM go deeper than just outdated software. Things reached a crisis point in 2011, which could be known as "The Year of the Open Letter." In July, just before the company announced its layoffs, BGR published a letter attributed to a "high-level RIM executive." It described the "transition" as "chaotic," with the workforce feeling "demotivated" by a lack of leadership. The author portrayed him or herself as a frustrated company loyalist needing to tell some hard truths.

"We missed not boldly reacting to the threat of iPhone when we saw it in January over four years ago," the letter read. "We laughed and said they are trying to put a computer on a phone, that it won't work. We should have made the QNX-like transition then. We are now 3-4 years too late. That is the painful truth… it was a major strategic oversight and we know who is responsible."

Delaying the transition had made RIM's position even more difficult. Not only would it be developing an entirely new operating system, eventually dubbed BlackBerry 10, but in the meantime it would maintain the previous version, BlackBerry 7. Any BlackBerry fan considering an upgrade would have to choose between buying an already obsolete device or waiting for the much-delayed BB10. It's a situation so common that business schools have a name for it: the Osborne Effect. When you announce great new products before they're ready, you may excite your customers. But you also give them reason to hold off buying, which can have a serious effect on sales. RIM hoped to use BB7 as a stop-gap, but the company says 80 to 90 percent of its US users don't run it — there's little reason to buy a new phone for a dead-end OS, and loyal fans may be waiting for BB10.

If customers were unenthusiastic about buying a dead-end OS, it's not surprising that employees didn't want to work on one. Yet according to Maclean's, the company split off its BB10 development group, hoping to give it the feel of a cohesive, passionate startup within the larger company. Similar compartmentalizing had worked at other companies, including Apple, but in this case it proved a predictable disaster. Those not working on BB10 recognized their work on legacy code would soon be obsolete. It created competition between haves and have-nots precisely when the company needed a unified effort, leading to employee protests and declining morale.

Alastair Sweeny knows how bad morale has gotten at RIM. He's the author of BlackBerry Planet: The Story of Research In Motion and the Little Device that Took the World by Storm, from which much of this history draws. Dysfunction is not new: that four-fold increase in its workforce that the company likes to brag about has meant an increase in bureaucracy, politicking, and what Sweeny calls a population of "time servers." He says, "It's like the Soviet Union. Everyone's pretending to work." Sweeny compares it to another brand-named tech firm with a reputation, deserved or not, for hidebound bureaucracy: Microsoft. RIM, he says, has lost the fire of a startup (despite heavy-handed efforts to recapture it), but without developing into a mature company. One anonymous employee agreed, telling BGR, "We are no longer a company that is innovative and energetic, we are drowning in paperwork."

A company at the top of its game can suffer some "time servers," but in times of adversity it's often the more confident, agile workers who go elsewhere. RIM's both seen an exodus of talent and had difficulty bringing in new recruits. If you're a bright, promising engineer, why stay in Waterloo, Ontario, when you can move to Silicon Valley and work for Facebook or Twitter? Last year's layoffs appeared designed only to reduce headcount, not to cull the well-insulated "time servers." Instead, many talented employees chose to leave — or were shown the door.

"It's like the Soviet Union. Everybody's pretending to work."

Jamie Murai was a student the University of Waterloo who had considered working with RIM. Not as an employee, but as a developer. Having written apps for iOS, he thought he'd try doing so on the PlayBook. He found the process so cumbersome that he posted a blog entry, "You Win, RIM! (An Open Letter To RIM's Developer Relations)." It went viral, getting 33,000 hits on the first day, he says. Soon after, Tyler Lessard, then the VP for developer relations, met him for coffee.

Much of what he'd written about, Murai says, Lessard already knew. The shortcomings in RIM's developer platform had long frustrated his team. "When they got all this bad press from my letter," Murai says, "all of a sudden their bosses were saying, 'Ok, you have the resources now get it fixed.' So it seems it was kind of a catalyst to get some things changed."

Rather than work on PlayBook software, Murai founded his own company, Maide, and moved to iOS apps. Tyler Lessard left RIM, but the company's new VP of developer relations, Alec Saunders, sees a bright future for developers. He told The Verge that, "For the first time, the company has an evangelism team." If Saunders is any indication, RIM now understands itself as a platform company competing with Apple. It's targeted Android developers especially, offering a tool to convert their apps, as well as free PlayBooks. Saunders often cites RIM data showing that the BB App World serves over six million downloads a day, generating 40 percent more revenue for developers than the Android Market. Where once the company's focus fell mainly on hardware, building an app ecosystem means strong attention to software. It also means recruitment: turning developers themselves into evangelists.

Persuasion offers its own challenges: two app ecosystems already compete for developer attention and resources. Given RIM's market and mindshare, Saunders understands the task before him. "Yeah, we're going through a transition, and every business, especially a platform business, goes through this," Saunders says, "My challenge, when you pick up a BB10 handset, is to make sure you don't say, 'Where are the apps?'"

Irish developer Steven Troughton-Smith attended a demonstration of the PlayBook 2.0 OS at this year's BlackBerry DevCon Europe. He left impressed at the interface, and eager to see BB10 shipping on phones. "If they can get everything to the level of the demos they showed today," he says, "then it could be a very interesting operating system. And with luck people will flock to it as upgrading Blackberrys; they can see these devices are just as graphical and awesome as an iPhone or Android phone or Windows Phone." He's already ported apps from Android to the PlayBook, and found the developer framework compelling. "If they can continue to make quality stuff and if BlackBerry 10 actually ships," he says, "I don't see any reason why I wouldn't release apps for it. I mean if it's good enough."