Mike Lazaridis

Mike Lazaridis co-founded BlackBerry in 1984 by the name ‘Research In Motion’ (RIM). He served as co-CEO of the company, alongside Jim Balsillie, through January 2012. The company, which integrated emailing capacity into the phones, was the first to lay foundation for the future Smartphones.

Among the largest mistakes that marked the end of Lazaridis’ tenure were- the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, a four day global service outage ,left BlackBerry phones unable to browse the Internet or access emails or instant messages  and a focus on business professionals even as consumer-centric products such as the iPhone absorbed market share. In the third quarter of 2012, BlackBerry’s worldwide market share of mobile device sales, by operating system, was just 5.3 percent, down from 11 percent in the third quarter of 2011 according to Gartner. Lazaridis gave up CEO leadership at RIM in early 2012.

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