By Ben Cohen
John Wall has spent nearly his entire career working for the same company. And when he tells people where he works, nobody has any clue what he's talking about.
"If I tell them I work at QNX," he said, "they don't know what that means."
But once he explains that he technically works at the company that owns QNX, he knows exactly how they will respond: BlackBerry 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."
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.
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.
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.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 01, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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