Could 2011 possibly have been a worse year for Research in Motion Ltd. and its BlackBerry platform? Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong for the Canadian maker of the BlackBerry and PlayBook devices.

Here are some of the moments RIM would surely prefer not to press into its scrapbook.

First, of course, there were the BlackBerry service outages that outraged users and sent many customers to their nearest Apple stores. For a period of several days in October, RIM seemed unable to keep its BlackBerry network running.

Then there's the issue of stock price. RIM's share of the smart-phone market has dropped precipitously this year, from 24 percent of the U.S. smart-phone market last year to just 9 percent this year. The stock price has seen a similar drop. RIM stock traded for as much as $70.54 per share during 2011 before dropping to the low teens. The current price is hovering around $13.

RIM hoped to call the upcoming v. 10 of its BlackBerry operating system BBX – to emphasize its ties to the PlayBook tablet's QNX OS – but was thwarted by a U.S. federal court that concluded the BBX trademark was already taken. So the new release will go by the unexciting name BlackBerry 10.

In Julne the company responded to falling revenues by laying off 2,000 employees, about 10.5 percent of its workforce.

RIM's performance has been so bad that last week the company slashed the salaries of co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis to $1 a year. This announcement was made at an analysts' briefing in which the company announced disappointing quarterly financial figures (a 71 percent drop in net income), predicted that no relief from poor financials was forthcoming, and admitted that its next-generation BlackBerry smart-phones would not ship until the second half of 2012. The company also revealed disappointing sales of its PlayBook tablet computer.

In November, two RIM vice-presidents traveling from Toronto to Beijing on business boarded the plane drunk and got so rowdy the flight was diverted to Vancouver so they could be booted off the plane – this after “chewing through” restraints airline personnel employed to keep them in their seats. The VPs don't work for RIM anymore, but the bad publicity won't go away.

As if all this weren't enough, a truckload of PlayBook tablets – about $2 million worth – was stolen while en route from Indiana to RIM headquarters in Waterloo, Ont., Canada.

RIM stock has rallied this week based on reports that Amazon, Microsoft, and Nokia have all considered purchasing the beleaguered company. There's no indication that any of these firms are still thinking about making an offer, however. But investors looking to cut their losses are selling and driving the stock price a bit higher.

RIM's BlackBerry products offer unique advantages to corporate customers. The company is still selling millions of phones per quarter. But it's going to take some kind of miracle to halt the plummeting fortunes that have plagued it in 2011.

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J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He works from home, generally without shoes.