Former Research in Motion CEO and cofounder Jim Balsillie has sold every single share of RIM — now BBRY — stock he owns, according to an SEC filing posted this morning.

Balsillie’s 26.8 million shares of common stock amounted to a 5.1 percent stake in the company. At one point — literally in the days right after the first iPhone launched — that much stock was worth around $6 billion.

But, oh, how the mighty have fallen. In 2012, when share prices for the company formerly known as RIM dropped into the single digits, a 26 million share stake amounted to less than five percent of what it was worth a few years before.

Check out this chart we made for the visual learners among you:

For comparison, here’s how other smartphone OS makers have done, stock-price-wise, between 2007 and today:

GOOG data by YCharts

As the fella said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And the wind for BlackBerry seems to be blowing in a decidedly southerly direction.

Clearly, the company is hoping to slow this momentum (we doubt anyone seriously thinks a fortune so colossally and complete lost can ever be totally recovered) by the launch of BlackBerry 10. While our own reviewer said the units aren’t half bad, he also noted it might be way, way too late to turn the ship around.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Research in Motion is cutting its supply chain up, starting with smartphone manufacturer Celestica, which will stop RIM production completely within the next 3-6 months.

The manufacturer expects to spend around $35 million on restructuring after RIM’s departure.

RIM has been reevaluating its supply chain as sales dwindle in the competition against iOS and Android. The company, whose devices were extremely popular in corporate environments, is failing to keep up with the consumer smartphone demands that Google and Apple have both readily met. In an effort to hold on, RIM is slimming down, including this supply chain restructure and an expected operating loss for its first quarter 2012 earnings.

“The on-going competitive environment is impacting our business in the form of lower volumes and highly competitive pricing dynamics in the marketplace, and we expect our Q1 results to reflect this and likely result in an operating loss for the quarter,” said RIM CEO Thorsten Heins in a recent company update that forced the company to halt trading on its stock.

Celestica reassured customers in its announcement today that it still anticipates a revenue increase from $1.65 billion to $1.75 billion, as well as a six cents increase on its earnings per share, at $0.26. The company is now being forced out into the wild to find new customers.

Early in June, RIM’s stock fell into the single digits at $9.57 a share for the first time in nearly a decade. The company is also planning to shut down production on its 16GB PlayBook, the company’s star-crossed attempt at entering the tablet market. But there is hope on the horizon for RIM. The company is planning to launch its Blackberry 10 operating system soon, which it hopes will refresh its line of smartphones.

Blackberry image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s been a long time coming — today we finally got our first glimpse at Research in Motion’s next-generation platform, BlackBerry 10, which aims to breathe new life into the company’s aging smartphones.

New RIM CEO Thorsten Heins hit the stage at BlackBerry World in Orlando, Florida today to show off the new platform. “We’re taking our time to make sure we get this right,” he said, perhaps hoping to squash criticisms of the long run-up to the availability of BB10 devices (expected later this year).

BlackBerry 10 is based on the QNX operating system used in RIM’s PlayBook’s tablet. Today, Heins showed off an early build of the OS, BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha, running on developer preview hardware. (It actually looks a lot like the PlayBook OS squeezed down to a smaller screen.) Developers attending BlackBerry World will receive one of the prototype BB10 devices, which will help them begin to develop new apps for the platform.

The BB10 interface seems refreshingly simple: the home screen consists of four widgets (weather, calendar, music, and photos, in the demo today), as well as phone, camera, and search buttons on the bottom of the screen. Notifications come in on the right side of the screen, and you can also swipe right to move into the app that the notification came from.

Surprisingly, Heins declared that BlackBerry 10 apps never stop running, which will allow you to easy juggle multiple apps without a sweat. It’s unclear how RIM is managing to do this without killing battery life though — something that BlackBerry users take seriously.

BB10′s software keyboard looks a lot like a typical hardware BlackBerry keyboard, but RIM also personalizes the keyboard to your typing style to remove latency. You can access numbers and symbols by gesturing from the keyboard, and RIM has also included some predictive text capabilities for one-handed typing.

RIM also briefly showed off the BB10 camera, which allows you to tap anywhere on the screen to take a photo. It also gives you the ability to step back or forward slightly from the moment you took a picture — so if someone blinks, you can save the picture pretty easily.

Heins described BlackBerry 10 as a “mobile computing engine.” He showed off a single BB10 device power several screens in a connected car (don’t expect to see this in your Accord anytime soon though). He reiterated that BB10 will launch sometime later this year.

RIM partners also showed off their BB10 wares: PixelMags is working on a magazine app, Fish Labs showed off the game Galaxy on Fire HD, and Mippin is working on the BlackBerry App Generator, which lets anyone easily create BlackBerry apps.

Photo via The Verge