After weeks of speculation (Research In Motion) RIM’s co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are resigning from their positions and will be replaced by company insider and former COO Thorsten Heins.
Heins, who also joins the company‘s board, is already listed as President and CEO on RIM‘s executive bios page. The change in leadership may be explained by a statement made by Lazaridis: “œThere comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognize the need to pass the baton to new leadership. Jim [Balsillie] and I went to the Board and told them that we thought that time was now.“
However, it is far from a clean break as both Balsillie and Lazaridis will stay on as directors and significant shareholders as part of the company’s board and management shuffle.
2011 saw almost a solid year of indiscretions under the leadership of Balsillie and Lazaridis. While the beginning of the year seemed to get off to a promising and exciting start with RIM’s introduction of the Playbook tablets, the launch was unsuccessful with key features like a native e-mail client being left out. Later in the year the company announced the name for a new combined OS only to learn they didn‘t have rights to that name. More recently, the company frustrated a large amount of Blackberry users globally when they suffered through an extended service outage and were heavily criticized for not providing sufficient feedback quick enough.
The company has also steadily slipped down the ladder in smartphone market share as Android competitors and Apple have released more innovative and well-received handsets.
RIM has also recently unveiled the new Playbook OS 2.0 which does feature its own email client.
Source: Mashable
