I was reading an article this morning by industry analyst Ross Rubin about how RIM needs something with the impact of Apple’s voice assistant technology, Siri.

Of course, Ross is correct, RIM definitely needs a big win like Siri. However, it occurred to me as I read through the article that RIM needs so much more than just a major new feature.

In all fairness to Ross, he was only focused on how RIM needed something — anything — to spur the company and didn’t get into everything else that was wrong.

RIM is like the Boston Red Sox of technology products. They were on top of the world, but ended up being the laughing stock of an entire industry. Now, no matter how hard they try to make it back, things just keep getting worse.

I still firmly believe that the problems with RIM start with the co-CEOs. They are responsible for driving the company forward with new technologies, designs and ideas (or in this case, driving the company into the ground). Yet for years they let the company rest on its laurels and not continue to innovate.

By the time RIM did start to put out new products, it was so far behind the competition that even catching up was almost impossible.

RIM desperately needs a change to the very top of the company. This will instill some much needed confidence in the company and its future products.

It also needs to figure out how to end system outages like it had last week. Things like that just can’t happen with a company the size of RIM.

The last piece of the puzzle is new products. Get rid of the crap they are currently selling and design a new line of products that people actually want.

Part of this phase is also coming up with some must-have features like Apple’s Siri.

Apple has taken the smartphone market in an entirely different direction than what RIM helped create years ago. The problem for RIM is that Apple circled back and created features and security options that directly compete with the BlackBerry.

I’m not sure users have enough confidence in RIM at this point to believe that any new hardware or software will be much different than what they already have.