Last night the news broke that Mike L. and Jim B. were stepping down as Co-CEOs of RIM. While this move will be loved on Wall Street, the thought of the company’s founders being pushed out scares me a bit in regards to the future of the companies products. Historically when the founders of a company step down the results are not good (as seen with Apple without Jobs and Yahoo without Yang).

Still things to seem to be promising about Thorsten Heins as CEO. For one he is being promoted from within the company. Secondly is that he has master’s degree in science and physics. My opinion is that technology companies need to be run by engineers rather then by businessmen.

Yesterday morning on twitter (well before any news broke) I linked to a piece in the Democrat and Chronicle about Kodak. The relevant part is below…

“You can trace the problems to when the MBAs kind of took control of the company,” Shippey said. There were plenty of people, he said, who saw the change coming and alerted the company. But it would have taken an innovator, not necessarily an MBA, to make the moves that were needed in a timely way.

So far the rumors about Heins are positive, so there is reason to be optimistic. But RIM must remain a technology driven company (even if that isn’t really what Wall Street wants).