What makes you think that all 2000 are engineers? RIM consists of many departments (IT, Sales, Marketing, R&D). They also have stuff like SAP for their ERP systems. That thing needs a team of developers that don't necessary develop "mobile" software.
From my knowledge, there are competing software/apps within the internal RIM ecosystems itself so these people that got laid off could potentially be the result of internal wars.
For example: software A that was built using the old RIM ecosystems (from the OS, the API, the toolkit, etc) and old mobile paradigms/concepts competes against software B that was built based on the latest web 2.0 + mobile crazed. Perhaps it's time for software A to die. Some companies might just shift these engineers to software B's team while other decided to shut down the whole team (sometime it's not easy to integrate new team members, especially if software B was a result of acquisition).
From my knowledge, there are competing software/apps within the internal RIM ecosystems itself so these people that got laid off could potentially be the result of internal wars.
For example: software A that was built using the old RIM ecosystems (from the OS, the API, the toolkit, etc) and old mobile paradigms/concepts competes against software B that was built based on the latest web 2.0 + mobile crazed. Perhaps it's time for software A to die. Some companies might just shift these engineers to software B's team while other decided to shut down the whole team (sometime it's not easy to integrate new team members, especially if software B was a result of acquisition).