TORONTO -- BlackBerry maker Research in Motion's (RIM) co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, are stepping down.
RIM said the pair who founded RIM will be replaced by Thorsten Heins, a chief operating officer who joined RIM four years ago from Siemens AG.
Balsillie and Lazaridis have headed Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM together for the past two decades.
The company took a big slide in 2011, dropping behind its peers in the lightning-paced smartphone market, suffering through the worst service outage in its history and losing tens of billions of dollars in market value.
And the PlayBook tablet, RIM's answer to the Apple iPad, failed to gain consumer support, forcing the company to give it deep discounts to move the devices off store shelves. (AP)