He told Bloomberg:

“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins

Heins’ comments have been mocked mostly for his eye-popping five-year prediction and because of the fresh memories of BlackBerry’s utter flop in the tablet market: the Playbook. But, really, it’s not totally impossible that something much more compelling than tablets may emerge before 2018 that will make iPads or Galaxy tablets unnecessary — that’s just the nature of tech. After all, BlackBerry executives know all too well how quickly an established market can change after watching the iPhone and Android decimate its smartphone  business over the last several years.

But, as a factual, across-the-board statement, the notion that “tablets aren’t a good business model” is problematic. There’s at least one company that might argue with him since it’s been doing pretty well in part thanks to its decision to start making tablets in January 2010. Samsung, for its part, seems pretty happy with its decision to get into that business too. Gartner expects the worldwide tablet business to grow from 197 million units this year to 467 million units by 2017.

You know who’s not having a great time in the tablet market? Companies that were late to the game. Like Motorola. And Dell. Don’t forget HP’s Palm debacle.

And, yes, BlackBerry. The BlackBerry Playbook arrived a year after the iPad, but the software was missing huge, important things, like native email and calendaring. The tablet flopped, and the company wrote off a large amount of unsold devices.

The Bloomberg article reminds us that Heins has previously said he’ll make another Playbook if he can make it profitably. That statement is more in touch with reality: it’s possible that BlackBerry can’t make a tablet that is measurably better than what’s already on the market and do it at a profit. It’s hard to compete with Apple and Samsung at this point, given their strong mobile computing brands and deep supply chains.

Heins seems to be implying that smartphones will be more central to the computing experience, as Matt Rosoff argues here at CITEWorld. That’s certainly plausible, but the idea that BlackBerry will be the one to figure this out is harder to believe.

In any event, Heins’ biggest priority right now is promoting his latest smartphones and the new BlackBerry 10 operating system. The success or failure of those products, as opposed to the future of tablets, will determine if his company is around in five years.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• The connected planet: Smartphones aren’t the only player
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

RIM is also adding more discoverability and social capabilities to the new BlackBerry World, allowing customers to share their content and app choices with friends through messaging and social networking apps, and even through a form of proximity-based communications. From the Inside BlackBerry Blog:

With BlackBerry World, there are various ways to browse, download, buy, and manage apps using a BlackBerry smartphone, BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, or desktop or laptop computer, — inspiration is at your fingertips. And if you find something you love and want to tell the world, you can easily share it with your friends over BBM, Facebook and Twitter. Also, you can simply tap smartphones together and invite your friends to download it — just like that.

There’s no word yet on how extensive RIM’s multimedia library will be, what pricing will be like, or whom the company is partnering with to supply those songs and videos. We’ll find out soon enough though. RIM said the new content would soon appear in the BlackBerry World web storefront, and in the coming weeks BlackBerry phone and tablets will receive software updates to reflect the app store changes.

In related news, BlackBerry is again publicly mulling the possibility of licensing the BlackBerry OS. In an interview with German newspaper Die Welt, CEO Thorsten Heins said that RIM is now focused on proving its net-gen QNX-based OS BlackBerry 10 in the market. If BB 10 is a success it would consider licensing it to other manufacturers, Heins said – and not to just handset makers. The BlackBerry OS and RIM’s QNX automotive infotainment software are converging in a platform called Car 2, which could make BB 10 the first industry-spanning operating system.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

As the year winds down, Heins is feeling better. “It’s fascinating to see how RIM has evolved in the last 10 months,” he said in an interview Thursday in downtown San Francisco.

BlackBerry 10 handsets, delayed several times already as RIM tries to perfect the device that will have to save the company, are on track for a January launch. New, decisive leaders are in place throughout the organization who are “being honest” with employees — a new concept at RIM — and a semblance of a plan for 2013 has emerged that banks on Heins’ belief that wireless carriers are sick of Apple and Samsung dominating the smartphone market.

RIM hopes to keep up its strong but low-margin performance in countries outside the U.S., regain the confidence of the US smartphone buyer with the BlackBerry 10 handsets, and eventually transition into a true “mobile computing” company that offers phones, tablets, medical devices, connected cars, and all manner of smart connected devices we commonly refer to as the internet of things.

It sounds good on paper. But the challenges are mighty: even assuming that RIM launches BlackBerry 10 handsets without incident in early February and they are well received by the critics, it has been a long time since most people in the U.S. with even a passing interest in smartphones thought about buying a BlackBerry. Unless those folks spend their money with RIM, Heins’ dreams of a mobile computing future may never get off the ground.

So what’s the short-term plan for recapturing the US? “You cannot be a leader without being in the U.S.” Heins said, hastily adding “North America” in a nod to his company’s home country. He thinks that U.S. carriers are salivating at the chance to offer RIM handsets because they offer “choice” that carriers currently don’t have; wireless carriers aren’t crazy about getting the lion’s share of their smartphones from just two companies.

“Android is mostly dominated by Samsung,” he said, adding “my prediction is that Samsung will basically be the strongest player in Windows 8.” Other handset makers can’t compete with Samsung’s in-house advantage in sourcing processors and displays from corporate siblings, Heins said.

RIM is the only other smartphone company that offers unique hardware and software in one package, Heins said. Microsoft may be poised to change that equation should it release its own smartphone, which seems more and more likely, but Heins believes that carriers are happy to see RIM back with a competitive product, and that the same kind of aggressive promotion that made Android a success can help BlackBerry 10.

The details of how that plan will unfold are apparently not ready for public consumption. RIM has spent a great deal of time and money this year convincing software developers that it is ready and willing to help them become successful on BlackBerry 10, but it’s these carrier relationships that will be crucial to RIM’s chances of coming back in the market. Heins declined to share 2013 shipment goals for BlackBerry 10: obviously, RIM has internal goals for the product, but a lot of what will happen with device shipments is “governed by our carriers. It’s not all in our hands.”

Heins drew some flak earlier this year for being quoted as saying “we have a clear shot at being number three” in the smartphone market, as if he weren’t setting his goals high enough.

“Make no mistake, my aspiration is to win,” he said Thursday. “But I can’t sit here in front of investors and partners and say we will be number one.”

What Heins is trying to do is shift the mobile playing field away from smartphones and toward the internet of things, or the spread of intelligent hardware, software and connectivity into everyday devices. That’s the market in which he thinks RIM has an advantage:

“iOS is five years old. At the end of the day it is a downsized PC OS. Look, they did a great job. My point is I’m ahead of them, I have a true mobile computing platform.”

If Heins is to ever make that claim stick, however, he’s going to have to convince a lot of people who have been buying that downsized PC OS for years to switch back to the BlackBerry in 2013.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

As we’ve mentioned before, this is desperation time for RIM, which is quickly losing ground to Apple and Google and is in danger of getting passed over by Microsoft’s Windows Phone. RIM needs to field a winner and reverse its sales declines. IDC reported last month that RIM shipped 7.7 million units in the third quarter, down 34.7 percent from the year ago quarter.

It’s unclear where the main launch will actually take place. RIM said it be held simultaneously in multiple countries.

RIM unveiled BlackBerry 10 at a developer event in May, prompting my colleague Kevin Tofel to express some guarded optimism. But in June, RIM pushed back the release of BlackBerry 10 until early 2013, setting off a wave of doubt about RIM’s ability to compete. Even with a firm Q1 launch for BlackBerry 10, RIM will have missed out on an important holiday season and will have to try to pick up ground against some hot-selling devices like the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S III. RIM said the platform is in testing with more than 50 carrier labs.

Still, RIM remains upbeat that it can compete. Here’s what CEO Thorsten Heins said in a statement:

“Our team has been working tirelessly to bring our customers innovative features combined with a best in class browser, a rich application ecosystem, and cutting-edge multimedia capabilities. All of this will be integrated into a user experience – the BlackBerry Flow – that is unlike any smartphone on the market today. Thanks to our strong partnerships with global carriers and a growing ecosystem of developers, we believe our customers will have the best experience possible with BlackBerry 10. We are looking forward to getting BlackBerry 10 in the hands of our customers around the world.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

But it’s hard not to do just that when BlackBerry faces tough times ahead. In June the company announced that the BlackBerry 10 wouldn’t be released until next year, and that it would cut 5,000 jobs. RIM’s presentation Tuesday was a plea for developers and carriers to hang on and wait for the new device, something the company has been saying since 2011.

RIM understandably played up its few advantages on Tuesday — a user-friendly keyboard, trusted security features, multiple language functionality and popularity in southeast Asia — but in the era of Apple mania and Android domination it’s hard to see how features like emoticon integration into the keyboard will make consumers think seriously about purchasing a BlackBerry. The company also announced that carriers are testing the new phones.

Heins, who said one of the things he’d learned in his time as CEO is that “showing is better than telling,” displayed a demo of a developer version of the BlackBerry 10, showing off apps like Facebook for BlackBerry. The company also said there would be apps for Foursquare, Twitter, and others, displayed on a touchscreen which will likely be popular with users whenever the phone ships.

While Heins didn’t name a date for shipment of the new phones, he did say it would be early 2013, which is the new target date set earlier this year. Heins spoke to a sparse audience in San Jose Tuesday at the company’s BlackBerry Jam conference that appeared to be populated by RIM staff, the media, and a handful of Blackberry developers. The developers seemed moderately excited about the announcements, but this wasn’t a raucous crowd by any stretch.

“In just a few short months away, BlackBerry 10 is on track. Our sales forces are getting ready,” Heins said. ”We’re lining up carriers to get ready to deliver the first BlackBerry 10 devices to you.”

The company’s presentation is best encapsulated in its developer-marketing video that played after Heins left the stage, with lyrics like “We’ve all seen these are challenging times, baby, ‘cuz we’re in transition,” and “The launch is just ahead, we’ll have BlackBerry 10, both in full touch and QWERTY editions.” It’s a must-watch:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

In a press release published Tuesday afternoon — at which time RIM’s shares were briefly halted in after-hours trading — RIM CEO and President Thorsten Heins suggested there was still hope for a positive future:

“We are continuing to be aggressive as we compete for our customers’ business – both enterprise and consumer – around the world, and our teams are working hard to provide cost-competitive, feature-rich solutions to our global customer base.  On the positive side, we expect to further increase our cash position in Q1 from the approximately $2.1 billion we had at the end of fiscal 2012.”

With regards to J.P.Morgan and RBC, Heins said:

“These advisors have been tasked to help us with the strategic review we referenced on our year-end financial results conference call and to evaluate the relative merits and feasibility of various financial strategies, including opportunities to leverage the BlackBerry platform through partnerships, licensing opportunities and strategic business model alternatives. “

Once RIM shares began trading again they were down 13 percent as the news was digested. Frankly, I’m surprised they weren’t lower as RIM’s transition has been too late and too slow; a deadly combination in a fast-moving mobile market.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Ahead of Mobile World Congress, Heins sat down with Businessweek and said that despite the company’s troubles, it was looking to foreign markets for a boost.

“In Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, BlackBerry is a very strong brand, a leading brand — we can really rely on that… That doesn’t mean we don’t have to earn this every day again. We have to do that.’’

To back up that statement, Businessweek turned to Avian Securities analyst Matt Thornton, who confirmed: “The brand is still stronger in Europe than it is here.”

And you can see where they’re coming from.

The growing industry perception of RIM is that it’s dead in the water, a feeling led in no small part by the U.S. media, which seems to believe that there are no worthwhile markets beyond its shores and tends to disregards the possibility that innovation can percolate outside Silicon Valley. Nokia got a beating for years in the U.S. tech press because it never cracked America — and when its products got outflanked by Apple, that negative perception simply accelerated to supersonic speeds.

While BlackBerry’s popularity has declined hugely in America, its share of usage in Europe is higher. In fact, by some measures, it had as much as 23 percent of smartphone usage across the continent by the end of last year. That’s a lot of users.

The myopia of the press upsets a lot of European businesses, and you can imagine that it also irks Heins, a German. His company is having a tough time, but it’s doing better than everyone realizes. Why can’t anyone understand?

The truth is, there are many different reasons the picture is murky.

For a start, the numbers are confused. Every survey or study or analysis of the European market comes up with wildly different numbers. The company claims to have the most popular smartphone in Britain, but Comscore pins BlackBerry OS at around eight to 10 percent of the market in Germany, France, the U.K., Italy and Spain.

Secondly, while perception and reality might not always be in lockstep, they are connected in vital ways. Media perception is a bellwether for consumer perception and, since it is usually based on some underpinning factor like profitability, it can actually have real meaning.

But I think what got me most about Heins’s statement was that it relies on the loyalty of users, as if they are cows who — as long as they are satisfied — are there to be milked. He suggests, essentially, that if RIM keeps doing the job it’s doing outside America, the users will keep coming.

That ignores reality. Loyalty means almost nothing in the mobile industry, where churn rates are high and operators spend vast amounts trying to coax new customers in. It’s not enough to keep existing customers merely satisfied: you have to delight them and intrigue them more than the competition could. Every time that contract comes up for renewal, or a handset upgrade, you have to be the first thought in their mind.

For that reason, more than ever, product is key — and that is where RIM has wasted its opportunities time and time again.

BlackBerry’s most embedded user base, the corporate market, has started to desert it as the consumerization of business technology leans toward more user-friendly devices. For many people, the goodwill was burned up with the horror show that was the BlackBerry Storm.

And even though it is trying to put new products out, RIM has suffered delays, a slowdown in sales and declining margins, all of which mean it has less money to spend. It’s a destructive cycle, and even loyal users only have so much patience.

I don’t think Heins is totally off-base. BlackBerry is a stronger brand outside the United States than inside it, and that counts for something. But without something to back it up, its brand is nothing more than an empty shell. That means it’s not Europe that is going to save the BlackBerry: it needs to do that for itself.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What to watch in mobile in 2013
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

On a wider-market level, there is good reason for RIM to be hosting a developer conference in Europe: it’s a market where it has had some mixed success of late, but that includes some key wins: data from GfK last week indicated that, in fact, BlackBerry is the most-purchased device brand at the moment in the UK. (Others say Android was the most popular, and still others claim the iPhone ran away with the market.) Thorsten Heins, in his keynote today, noted that 65 percent of the population of Europe, Middle East and Africa are still using feature phones. And that, despite everything, still spells opportunity for RIM.

RIM today said that it now has 60,000 apps in its App World applications storefront — still miniscule compared to the millions that live collectively on the Android Market and Apple’s App Store — but a significant improvement on the 17,000 that were in App World last January. Collectively, the store has seen 2 billion downloads as of last month, with 6 million downloads per day.

The company’s VP of developer relations, Alec Saunders, also repeated a claim we’ve heard before from the company: after Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), AppWorld is the “most profitable” of mobile platforms. This is based on the company claiming to have more paid downloads than Android’s Market, where the vast majority of popular apps are free to download. Part of RIM’s approach has been to enable carrier billing to pay for app downloads — meaning that the apps get charged directly to a users’ bill. That is something that is still nascent on the Market. (Apple handles billing itself via iTunes.) RIM says that it has now enabled carrier billing in 34 different countries

What’s interesting is that Saunders also spelled out a bit of detail on how much money developers are making on the platform: apparently, 13 percent of all app publishers have made $100,000 or more through AppWorld. That detail sparked off some responses:

“On the other platforms, virtually no one covers their investment as anything more than a hobby,” one developer, Matt Baxter-Reynolds, tweeted to me earlier. “That metric is just not believable.” That kind of thinking underscores the idea that apps and app stores are really just there to drive more stickiness to a platform and encourage more hardware sales.

But another raised the point that in fact RIM most likely attracts a different kind of app maker than those who have swarmed to iOS and Android. “I’d say [that is] reasonable,” noted another developer, Shaun Austin. “BB doesn’t seem a platform as likely to attract hobbyists in the way Android/iOS does.”

Of the apps that are selling best, four out of the top 10 on App World are games for the PlayBook tablet, RIM said. You can read that as a vote for engagement for a tablet that has been less than successful against the iPad and Android-based tablet makers.

Last week, RIM released an updated SDK for the BBM Social Platform, a newish area the company has been exploring, leveraging the wide usage it already has for its BlackBerry Messenger service. Today it noted that it now has 50 million people engaging on that platform through various apps, with the most-used of them being the BlackBerry version of Wikitude, an augmented-reality search app.

Looking ahead, it’s products like the BBM Social Platform that are perhaps where RIM should be putting more of its focus: it is, after all, an experience that is unique to RIM and helps set it apart from other handset makers. The company is gearing up for two significant platform updates in the months ahead, with BlackBerry 10 for handsets and PlayBook 2.0 for the tablet, and all eyes will be on how dynamic and easy these will be to use in creating services. RIM has already said that it will be looking for close integration of the BBM Social Platform with BlackBerry 10, which will the see the company doing more in social gaming on the OS.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Development strategies for the app-developer community
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• A near-term outlook for the mobile app marketplace

Heins takes over a company once synonymous with mobile computing–a company whose BlackBerry was fondly compared to one of the most addictive drugs we’ve yet to come up with on this planet–that has profoundly lost its way as it continues to crank out products designed for the mobile world of five years ago. It’s true that it’s having trouble doing even that, which is why RIM founder Mike Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie had to go, finally bowing to the pressure in an announcement timed to appear during two of the biggest American football games of the season involving teams from the tech sectors of Silicon Valley and New York.

But Heins doesn’t inherit a company that was on the right track, one that has some good ideas but needs help selling those ideas and making sure they arrive on time. RIM’s problems are deeper, chief among them that the QNX software it acquired to finally enter the modern mobile computing era seems to be incapable of working with its trademark BlackBerry e-mail system.

In multiple interviews Sunday and during a conference call on Monday, Heins refused to acknowledge that RIM’s product strategy may be flawed. “RIM has gone through a tremendous growth phase, but we innovated while we were developing the product, and that needs to stop,” he said this morning, implying (but fooling few observers) that RIM is coming up with so many awesome ideas that it’s having a hard time getting them all into its products.

Obviously Heins can’t come out in his first public appearance with a doom-and-gloom routine, but judging by his initial statements it’s not clear whether he realizes the scope of the turnaround project he has signed on to complete. RIM needs all the things he mentioned–better marketing and operational discipline–but it also needs to end its isolation from the broader mobile world of application developers and come up with ideas that will meet the mobile-computing needs of consumers in 2015 rather than scrambling to develop stop-gap solutions for 2012.

In what seemed like a testy interview with Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Heins scoffed at the notion that RIM needed change.

Change to what? Change for what? I mean, what’s the objective of a change? We’ve made a lot of changes in the past 18 months. … We didn’t stand still in the last 18 months, we did our homework. And I think we will complete our homework soon.

So in the same thought, he balked at the notion that RIM needed change and then pointed out how many changes RIM has made over the last 18 months.

There is a business-school case study waiting to be written about this era of RIM, from 2007 through the next few years. It’s a solidly profitable company with a growing user base outside the U.S. that has no grasp of the future, a resistance to outside ideas, and a management team completely tone deaf to the modern consumer. Heins, a RIM executive who came on board during that pivotal year in which Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) introduced the iPhone, may be part of the solution but he has also been part of the problem.

RIM’s fundamental problem is that it hasn’t designed a good forward-thinking and intuitive piece of software in years. It still makes the best hardware keyboards in the business and still operates a back-end network that consumes data far more efficiently than other phones, but the BlackBerry OS is outdated and ill-suited for an era dominated by touchscreen user interfaces.

That’s what QNX was supposed to bring to RIM, and the company has utterly failed to integrate that software into a meaningful product almost two years after it acquired the technology. We won’t know if RIM can salvage QNX until we get a better look at the Playbook 2.0 software released earlier this month and more crucially, until the first BlackBerry 10 (the new name for QNX) handsets arrive in late 2012.

Heins does not have a lot of time. Apple and Android are deeply established in the minds of both neophyte smartphone owners and experienced software developers as the only two worthwhile mobile computing worlds. And Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK), not RIM, are best positioned to capture any demand left on the table with well-received phones actually in the market.

And he’ll have to operate with Lazaridis watching carefully over his shoulder from a board role under the guise of providing “strategic counsel.” In other words, it’s not clear how much latitude Heins has to refocus RIM’s priorities around software development when the father of the BlackBerry will still wield power inside the company.

Everyone knew Lazaridis and Balsillie had to go, not only because of investor pressure but because companies need to send signals to the market and to its employees that failure on such a grand scale cannot be tolerated. But when RIM investors met the new boss on Monday and realized that he wasn’t all that different from the old boss, they sighed heavily and sold off more of the company’s stock, now down 6 percent in the hours since Heins’ conference call concluded. (It finished down 8.58 percent for the day, and is now down 72 percent compared to January 2011.)

We once again recall the words of Lou Gerstner, who pulled off a successful reinvention of IBM two decades ago that wasn’t all that different from the task ahead of Heins: “No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.”

RIM is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive. When will it realize that?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Fixing Fragmentation: Google’s Key to the Enterprise Tablet Space

Heins said he was open to licensing the BlackBerry 10 platform set to appear at the end of this year but is focused now on strengthening RIM’s integrated smartphone model.

“I don’t think there is some drastic change needed. We are evolving, we are evolving our tactics . . . this is not a seismic change, this is scaling the company further,” Heins said.

He said the company needs to focus on being more marketing driven as well as communicating to customers, especially consumers. Heins also mentioned he is looking to fill the open chief marketing officer position as soon as possible and wants someone who can listen as well as communicate and take RIM’s marketing up a notch.

Heins said RIM also needs to execute better on innovation. He thinks there needs to be a more orderly process of achieving innovation and then building a product, so the innovation discoveries can be applied to prototypes, not products in the midst of development. Heins, who was most recently the chief operating officer for Product and Sales, said he was not held back previously as COO.

One thing Heins is not interested in doing is separating RIM’s businesses. He said the company’s strength is in its integrated approach to hardware, software and ecosystem, drawing a comparison to Apple. He touted QNX, the basis of both the PlayBook operating system and the BlackBerry 10 smartphone platform, saying it could be applied to other markets beyond tablets and smartphones. He also touted QNX’s ability to handle true multitasking and said it will be able to run Android apps, which should address questions about the number of apps available on BlackBerry devices.

Heins also added that he was interested in building up a culture to empower employees to take appropriate decisions, take risks and be accountable for their decisions.

Again, this isn’t much different than the comments put out on Sunday night by Heins. But it again shows what RIM’s priorities are. The company doesn’t see a big problem on its hands, just something that a little more efficiency, innovation and marketing will solve. I hope that attitude is Heins’ way of being more deferential to former CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, because it seems like the company needs more than that to really compete.

There doesn’t seem to be a real sense of urgency on the part of Heins, and that could be a problem. RIM is falling behind, and it needs to transform itself quickly. If you have any doubt, just look at Nokia over the past few years: It may have had the right strategy, but it took far too long to execute it.

Heins seems to believe that RIM is going to be fine because it has an integrated approach, just like that “other fruit company.” But there’s a lot of distance between Apple and BlackBerry, and I don’t think marketing is the key differentiator here. RIM needs to put out some stellar devices with great software and apps. If you do that, the marketing comes more easily. Right now, RIM doesn’t have much of a story to tell, and a new CMO won’t change things. RIM needs to find something that it can do better than others. It can’t just reach parity with iOS and Android and hope it can compete again.

That’s why I’m worried about Heins. He doesn’t seem prepared to really light a fire under RIM. And with Lazaridis and Balsillie hovering over him, I wonder if he can break free of their legacy quickly enough and forcefully enough to matter. We will see. We just have words from RIM here. The real test is what products we see and how quickly they come to market.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues