BlackBerry maker co-CEOs step down

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,RIM8217;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.