Research in Motion, whose Blackberry handsets dominated the mobile phone scene only a few short years ago, announced Monday it was cutting 2,000 jobs — about 11 percent of its global workforce — as it falls further behind the curve now defined by the iPhone and Android-powered smartphones.

In cutting workers for the first time in a decade RIM joins Nokia as a once-mighty player who couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt quickly enough to a pace of innovation and quixotic consumer expectations that has only accelerated since the introduction of the original iPhone in June 2007. In what seems like the blink of an eye RIM is now playing a game of catch-up with upstarts Apple and Google — big, powerful competitors who came out of nowhere to to become chip leaders in the high-stakes smartphone game.

Nokia got hit with the same headwind. The biggest phone maker in the world — 28.2 percent of the market at the end of last year — announced in February that it was ditching its Symbian smartphone operating system and replacing it with software from Microsoft.