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When technology companies fall, they rarely get up again.

One time titans such as Digital Equipment, Compaq Computer, Lucent Technologies and Palm went cold and then were acquired. Xerox and Nokia have limped along for years. Eastman Kodak just filed for bankruptcy protection.

Only two companies have bucked the trend: Steve Jobs’s Apple and Lou Gerstner’s International Business Machines.

The lessons of those exceptions are legendary. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he winnowed its product line, replaced most of the board, and expanded into new markets such as music players. After arriving at IBM in 1993, Gerstner cut more than 100,000 jobs, killed its uncompetitive OS/2 PC operating system, and began a shift from hardware to consulting.

The message was different when, under shareholder pressure, the board of Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry maker Research In Motion finally replaced co-chief executive officers Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis with chief operating officer Thorsten Heins on Jan. 22.

“I don’t think that there is some drastic change needed,” said Heins, a former Siemens executive, in his first conference call as RIM’s new boss.

Staying the course, however, will be a challenge, and investors have already registered displeasure. After Heins’s comments, RIM’s stock fell more than 8 percent. The company declined to make him available for this story.

The plan is for RIM to continue investing in both hardware and software, scrapping its aging BlackBerry operating system for one called BlackBerry 10 based on software from a company acquired in 2010 and used to run nuclear plants.

So far, the outlook isn’t encouraging. The PlayBook tablet, RIM’s first device based on an early version of the new operating system, has been a flop. And as RIM reboots in tablets, Apple’s iPad is dominating the first major new corporate hardware market in years.

Veeva Systems co-founder Matt Wallach, who has sold pharmaceutical sales software for 14 years, says 95 percent of his customers are equipping employees with iPads, and the other 5 percent are considering it.

“The iPad’s success in the enterprise means that RIM is dead, at least in pharma,” Wallach says.

To succeed against Cupertino, California-based Apple, which reported more than twice as much in net income in the fourth quarter ($13.1 billion) as RIM did in revenue ($5.2 billion) in the period ended Nov. 26, the BB10 phones will need to do far more than match the quality of iPhones and Android devices.

They’ll have to roll out some groundbreaking features — “and that’s a herculean task,” says Matt McCormick, an asset manager at Bahl & Gaynor in Cincinnati.

Of course, it’s possible that RIM could regain its position as a top choice for application developers, consumers, and corporate buyers. The company still generates healthy cash flow and has about 75 million subscribers worldwide.

Its executives point to BlackBerry’s dominance in emerging markets such as South Africa and Mexico. The company plans to introduce a line of gadgets based on BB10 in the second half of this year, Lazaridis said last month.

“We’re excited and confident in our future,” says Tenille Kennedy, a company spokeswoman. “We’re willing to have shareholders judge Thorsten and RIM on its performance.”

Still, history shows it would be difficult to stage a comeback.

“Once you become a dinosaur, it’s hard to catch up,” says Richard J. Moroney, chief investment officer of asset management firm Horizon Investment Services.

While RIM might fare better if it were allied with a larger company, the list of potential suitors is short. Microsoft is busy building its own operating system and focusing on its partnership with Nokia. Samsung Electronics was once seen as a good match: Although the Suwon, South Korea-based company has a thriving smartphone business, it is reliant on Android software from Google, which has a deal to acquire competing handset maker, Motorola Mobility Holdings. James Chung, a Samsung spokesman said the company isn’t interested.

With a market value of about $8 billion, RIM is probably too pricey for private-equity firms to swallow, according to a banker who declined to be named because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Breaking up the company is another possibility proposed by Mike Abramsky, an RBC Capital Markets analyst. He suggests that RIM could increase shareholder returns by dividing itself into a handset business and another that manages the BlackBerry service, including e-mail, security, and the popular instant-messaging program BBM.

Heins told analysts that “I will not in any way split this up or separate this into different businesses.”

The new CEO has said that he is open to another potential lifeline: licensing the company’s new operating system. Given the threat from the Motorola-Google combination, Samsung might be interested in building handsets based on BB10. So far BlackBerry’s ecosystem doesn’t have the support it needs from developers who build popular apps such as Angry Birds, says Adnaan Ahmad, an analyst at Berenberg Bank in London, which severely limits the appeal.

Finally, RIM could give up the dream of being a mobile-hardware powerhouse and instead exploit its reputation for running reliable, secure networks by selling that service to companies using other types of smartphones. It’s already taken a step in that direction, introducing a service in November called Mobile Fusion that corporate IT departments can use to manage the growing number of Android and Apple-compatible smartphones and tablets securely.

For a generation of loyal BlackBerry users who’ve spent their professional lives punching out messages on their “CrackBerry,” such a move might seem unthinkable. It is, however, a path successfully followed by IBM, which dominated the personal computer industry from 1981 until the early 1990s. Gerstner refocused the company on the more profitable software and services industries.

Bloomberg