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By

Ben Cohen

May 1, 2026 9:00 pm ET

But once he explains that he technically works at the company that owns QNX, he knows exactly how they will respond: BlackBerry BB 0.14%increase; green up pointing triangle still exists? 

Yes, it does. And no, it doesn’t make phones. 

The company formerly known as Research In Motion abandoned hand-held devices a decade ago, and it feels more like a century ago when phones had clicky keyboards and everyone was obsessed with Brick Breaker.

But an astonishing number of people still rely on BlackBerry—and they don’t realize it. 

The company’s most lucrative product is not hardware but the hidden software in 275 million cars on the road today. In fact, BlackBerry’s essential technology can be found in all sorts of unexpected places, and you wouldn’t find it even if you went looking for it. 

“On a car, you’ll never see QNX’s logo,” said Wall, the division’s president. “What you will see is a better experience.” 

He likes to think of QNX engineers as plumbers and electricians, responsible for the stuff we need and never see. In a house, it’s pipes and wiring. In a car, it’s the software underpinning safety features that we take for granted. QNX is the operating system that enables all kinds of driver assistance: collision warnings, blind-spot notifications, adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection and steering you back into a lane when you’re drifting into trouble. 

“We’re the foundation,” Wall said. “Everything pretty on top wouldn’t work without a strong foundation.” 

QNX’s operating system, which controls a number of safety features, is found in 275 million cars on the road. QNX

That foundational software has never been so valuable. As cars become computers on wheels, QNX is trusted by the world’s largest automakers because its simple, real-time operating system is designed to never, ever fail. “The only way to make this software malfunction,” a user once raved to Fortune magazine, “is to fire a bullet into the computer running it.” 

With its bulletproof reputation, the software has spread to factory floors and other workplaces that value safety, precision and tech that won’t glitch. In hospitals, for example, QNX tech is embedded in surgical robots and dozens of medical devices, which means patients are regularly putting their lives in the hands of doctors, nurses—and BlackBerry.

QNX has even become the foundation of a company left for dead long ago. 

The division that was once a rounding error is the reason that BlackBerry is suddenly making money again. Instead of being ignored by the rest of the company, QNX now accounts for half of its total revenue, and BlackBerry has strung together four straight profitable quarters for the first time since its signature product was competing with the iPhone. 

Since a bullish earnings call last month, the stock is up 50%. It’s still down 96% since its peak. But after everything the company has been through, executives are firing off a new message: BlackBerry is back. 

“The BlackBerry story,” its CEO declared on that call, “is now a growth story.” 

The story began when QNX was acquired in 2010 to help with the next generation of BlackBerrys. But by then, nothing could have helped. The company’s market cap had topped out two years earlier at $83 billion. It’s now worth $3 billion and Apple does more sales in a morning than BlackBerry does in the whole year.

Created with Highcharts 9.0.1BlackBerry's QNX FactorCars enabled by the company's QNX techSource: the company

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John Wall had a front-row seat to this spectacular crackup. 

QNX was founded in 1980 and Wall has worked for the Canadian company since he graduated college in the early 1990s. After the acquisition in 2010, many engineers moved over to RIM to build a mobile operating system for the BlackBerry. Wall stayed behind. 

While others worked on phones, his team kept plugging away at car software—and kept their QNX email addresses. 

For years, they benefited from a fantastic competitive advantage: complete and utter neglect. 

“Nobody paid attention to us,” Wall said. 

Left to their own devices, they made enough progress in car infotainment systems that Silicon Valley began paying very close attention. 

Google unveiled its own Android infotainment system, then Apple picked off QNX engineers to help build a whole car. Once again, it looked like BlackBerry was about to be squashed. 

But in 2014, with the tech giants closing in, Wall made a pivotal trip to Silicon Valley to see one of his favorite QNX customers. He also saw his future. 

Once considered obsolete, the company is now in growth mode. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Over hefeweizens, Audi’s engineering chief told him the automaker was moving to Google for infotainment. But he wasn’t breaking up with Wall. The next generation of cars would need reliable safety features that didn’t exist yet, he explained. Instead of battling for control of the screen, Wall decided, QNX could own the software under the hood. It turned out to be the most productive beer of his life. 

“The circumstances that led to us losing infotainment pivoted the company in the right direction,” Wall said, “whether or not we knew it at the time.”

What they did know was that they didn’t have a choice. 

“There was no alternative,” he said. “We had to take what we had and figure out: Where do we go now?” 

There was only one place to go: much deeper into the car.    

After proving itself in cars, the software has found its way into medical devices, industrial automation and robotics. But going to more places hasn’t led to any more recognition for software’s plumbers and electricians. 

“The customer cares about the function of lane-keep assist,” Wall said. “They don’t care about the fact that the operating system below is blah, blah, blah.” 

Or that the blah, blah, blah is made by BlackBerry or QNX—or wherever he works.

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A new study warns that if satellite operators suddenly lose control during a major disruption, a catastrophic collision in orbit could happen in as little as 2.8 days.

A major solar storm does not need to smash satellites apart directly to create a crisis in orbit. It may only need to interrupt the tracking, commands, and avoidance maneuvers that keep today’s crowded satellite environment under control.

That risk is growing as low Earth orbit fills with mega constellations, large networks of satellites launched and replaced in rapid cycles. These spacecraft support internet access, communications, weather monitoring, navigation, and other services. However, they also add congestion to an orbital region where objects travel at roughly 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour).

A new paper led by Sarah Thiele, who began the work as a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and is now at Princeton, attempts to measure how fragile this system has become. The study introduces a metric called the Collision Realization And Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock, which estimates how long it could take for a serious collision to occur if satellites could no longer maneuver or if operators lost reliable awareness of where objects were.

The result is alarming. Using satellite catalog data from June 2025, the researchers calculated that if operators lost the ability to send commands for avoidance maneuvers, a catastrophic collision could occur in around 2.8 days. A broader version of the CRASH Clock, based on all resident space object interactions, was 5.5 days. Back in 2018, before the rapid expansion of mega constellations, that value was 164 days.

Solar storms as a systemic threat

Satellites in low Earth orbit do not simply coast along fixed paths. They depend on station keeping, tracking updates, and collision avoidance maneuvers. According to SpaceX’s most recent biannual report cited in the study, Starlink satellites performed 144,404 collision avoidance maneuvers between December 1, 2024, and May 31, 2025. That averages 41 maneuvers per satellite per year, or one avoidance maneuver every 1.8 minutes across the Starlink network.

During a major solar storm, this carefully managed system can become harder to control. Solar storms heat Earth’s upper atmosphere, causing it to expand. That increases drag on satellites, pulls spacecraft away from predicted paths, forces operators to use fuel to maintain altitude, and makes orbit forecasts less reliable.

The May 2024 “Gannon Storm” showed how disruptive this can be. Nearly half of all active satellites in low Earth orbit maneuvered because of increased atmospheric drag. The study notes that widespread repositioning, combined with unpredictable drag, made collision assessment during and after the storm much harder.

The danger grows if a storm also disrupts navigation, communications, or ground control. In that case, satellites may be harder to track just as they become less able to respond.

Why one collision matters

Kessler syndrome is the most well-known version of this kind of catastrophe, where cascading collisions fill orbit with debris and eventually make it extremely difficult to safely launch or operate spacecraft. But that runaway scenario would take years or decades to fully unfold.

To highlight the much more immediate danger, the researchers introduced a new metric called the Collision Realization and Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock, which estimates how quickly a major, debris-generating collision could become possible if active satellite control and coordination were disrupted.

Even one high-speed impact can have lasting consequences. A collision between large objects can create thousands of fragments, each becoming another hazard. Today’s debris environment is still shaped by China’s 2007 anti-satellite test involving Fengyun 1C and the 2009 collision between Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251.

The new study finds that the densest parts of today’s satellite networks are now especially concerning. Starlink’s main shell, around 550 kilometers (342 miles) above Earth, reaches densities more than an order of magnitude higher than the peak in tracked debris near 800 kilometers (497 miles).

A shrinking margin for error

The researchers estimate that across all of low Earth orbit, close approaches within 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) occur every 36 seconds. Encounters involving at least one satellite occur about every 41 seconds, while those involving Starlink and another resident space object occur about every 47 seconds.

A close approach is not the same as a collision. Operators weigh distance, uncertainty, object size, and collision probability before deciding whether to move a satellite. Still, the frequency of these encounters shows how dependent orbit has become on fast, accurate, coordinated control.

Major solar storms are rare, but they are not hypothetical. The May 2024 Gannon Storm was the strongest geomagnetic storm in decades. The Carrington Event of September 1859 was at least twice as intense, according to the paper, and included two strong storms within a few days.

If a Carrington-scale storm occurred today, it would hit a world that relies heavily on satellites for communications, timing, Earth observation, weather forecasting, military operations, disaster response, finance, and navigation. It would also strike an orbital environment far more crowded than it was even a decade ago.

Beyond collision risk, mega constellations also contribute to debris, reentry hazards, interference with astronomy, and atmospheric pollution.

The study does not call for eliminating satellites, but it highlights a critical vulnerability. Low Earth orbit now relies on constant, precise control, and if that control is disrupted, the window to prevent a major collision could be just days.

Reference: “An orbital house of cards: Frequent megaconstellation close conjunctions” by Sarah Thiele, Skye R. Heiland, Aaron C. Boley and Samantha M. Lawler, 10 December 2025, arXiv.
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2512.09643

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Storin spoke with The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute’s Megan Graham about how the company is trying to keep up in the quickly changing space. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

WSJLI: I just asked our company’s Gemini who we should use for video business software. The reply listed Zoom first, saying it’s the “industry standard”—so, good job on that. It’s interesting to see its explanation for why that is, and what kind of information it cites, including Gartner rankings and other factors. I’m sure you’re thinking about all of these things constantly.

Kim Storin: All day long. And are we getting pulled into the right things, do we have the FAQs built into every single page that they need to be, so that the LLMs are pulling the right information? It’s a whole new world.

We have 99% brand awareness, so we don’t have a brand awareness problem. We do have a perception challenge, because video is fairly commoditized at this point. What Zoom has done to grow is to build and to buy across other workflows. So we have a product for job recruiters, for example, and a contact center for customer support, so if your vacuum breaks and you’re calling SharkNinja, they’re using Zoom. We have a phone platform for small businesses. We have webinars and events for marketers.

With our answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization efforts, we know that we’re showing up and we’ve got all the right citations when it comes to videoconferencing. But how are we showing up for our contact center business? How are we showing up in webinars against our competition? Are we capturing the rest of this growth in the market that we have to in order to continue to grow outside of just a commoditized video space?

WSJLI: When did you start to think about this as a CMO?

Storin: I think it was last fall where we started. It had been a conversation before that, but I remember being at an event in September where I sat down with the CMO of software review website G2, which had just gotten this really hot, fresh data showing that the number of people starting their discovery on LLMs had shot up quickly.

It was that moment where I’m like, holy smokes, in three months that number has shot up and we can’t be passively thinking that this is all going to align. And we can’t keep thinking that our SEO team understands what it takes for AEO and GEO in the same way that they’re experts in SEO. It’s interconnected, but it’s way bigger.

That was when we really kicked off our efforts in earnest, where I set up a SWAT team. SEO has to play a role. But so does content, so does our web team, so does our data team, so does our brand and media team. It’s so complex. How are we changing the way that we’re building content?

WSJLI: How does the SWAT team work?

Storin: We have a weekly core team meeting treating this like any other cross-functional effort. We’re standing up an agile marketing approach, but for something that’s not a campaign. It’s fundamentally how we do work, how we market.

WSJLI: How does your business-to-business focus make optimizing for LLMs different than it might be for companies trying to appeal to consumers?

Storin: B-to-b buyers don’t want to talk to a salesperson for most of their journey. That’s a big change. They’re not sitting down with 15 vendors and getting to know the vendors. They’re spending 80% of that time researching, talking to ChatGPT, talking to their friends, getting referrals, researching online, and then you only get that meeting if you’re shortlisted. Now, our goal is to get on that shortlist.

WSJLI: How are you thinking about how the LLMs pick up conversations about Zoom on these various platforms like Reddit? 

Storin: It is authenticity that is getting pulled through, driving engagement. It’s vulnerability.

One report came out recently that said LinkedIn is number one in terms of LLM citing. Well, that changes your whole strategy, because it’s not brands that are getting picked up. Your executives are being cited as part of this. Reddit is also up there, and Substack. And then, obviously, press releases matter again, in a way that they didn’t matter as much two years ago.

So now it’s like, how do you convince your executive team that they need to be active on LinkedIn? How do you convince your team to get back on board after we’ve been trying to tell them fewer press releases? Not only do we need press releases, but they need to be press releases specifically designed for LLM pickup. It’s a totally different approach. 

WSJLI: How are you staying on top of it?

Storin: Nobody can be on top of it. I think it’s one of those things that is just evolving every single day. People are surprised when I say that we don’t have it all figured out.

I launched a GPU-accelerated server in 2015 and so I’ve been living in this machine-learning, deep-learning space for more than 10 years now. What I learned back then is what I’m seeing now, which is that if you don’t build some kind of cross-functional core competency in-house, you will not be able to actually see results that are driving outcomes at scale.

We’re basically taking that same approach. In our organization, they have to be curious, they have to be agile, and they have to take calculated risks. It’s more of a culture shift than it is an expertise shift at this point.