I get a lot out of Alex Smith’s newsletters about strategy, and love the book “No Bullsh*t Strategy”. Today he put one out which resonated more than most, so much so, I wanted to adapt it here, for our industry and for our customers.
Its fundamental message is pretty basic – about demand and supply – but in business many have forgotten it and many are about to learn a brutal lesson, deservedly so IMHO.
I’ve opined before about the rise of knuckle-dragger, and how the majority of our sector doesn’t really add any true value at all. For the majority of consumers’ (by which I include SMEs) experience, their self-proclaimed “carrier” is a reseller and the only real value they’ve often added is exposure – theirs is the cold-call the customer took. Oftentimes, they destroy value through the injection of complication with, for example, punitive 7 year contracts – value which was either never there in the first place or which was added by the house of cards of other resellers underneath them. I’ve blogged about “Honour” before, because it really gets on my proverbials – selling is a skill, finding a solution for a customer adds value and some resellers/MSPs do genuinely move the needle for the customer, but let us be perfectly honest with ourselves: many don’t, and the world would be a better place if some didn’t exist. I’d love to name names from our own experiences of the kind who turned off service at a florist in the run up to Mother’s Day (amongst others) just to extort a contract renewal away from the underlying service provider (our customer) in order to put them out of business – karma will come, but I’m getting impatient.
Alex makes the point that when something becomes abundant and cheap it loses value. He is referring to AI here but I think the lesson carries much further and I’d add “easy to access” to the list. Thirty years ago when we started, telecoms was hard and pretty impenetrable. It wasn’t just technically hard, it was commercially restrictive – getting in the club required more than knocking on the door and being welcomed. To Ofcom’s credit it has opened up immeasurably (save for mobile where the oligopoly is fiercely protected), and companies like Simwood have removed the technical hurdles, exposing things through simple APIs. In 2026, the world is one of APIs and those who can build can create amazing things – they can add value where most of the effort is visible, i.e. they’re not spending 99% of effort under the hood in areas that’ll never be seen or appreciated, like one had to in the old days. Think of an iceberg where most of it lies beneath the surface; in 2026 you can procure just the bit you see. You can move fast, you can move light. That is progress and it is good.
However, back to Alex’s point, in business we look at AI and other technical progress as something that is only available to us. Being able to automate your marketing to send crappy AI-generated pseudo-personalised e-mails might save you a fortune but does it give you a win? No, because if it works everyone else can adopt it for the same low cost, and it likely won’t work because (speaking from personal experience), 9 out 10 emails landing in inboxes or DMs will be marked as spam and blocked. Hell, some people can’t even muster the competence and effort to do it properly despite it being trivially easy – noting the three idiots who sent me lamely personalised messages on Christmas Day – but even those who can are not sustainably adding value versus everyone else.
People look to AI and technology and assume glory and riches shall be theirs, neglecting that everyone else has access to the same. Sure, at this early stage there is some knowledge that can optimise cost or the discovery of niche providers others don’t know about (you’d be amazed many times have I heard “secret weapon” in descriptions of Simwood) but ultimately, if you can produce AI slop so can someone else; if you can create an app with no code, so can someone else; if you can find an API that you don’t even need to integrate with any more to resell, so can someone else. What was scarce had value, but by the laws of supply and demand it won’t going forwards.
Sure, there’s a degree of an “arms race” here. For example, we’re actively but judiciously using AI within Simwood at every level of the business, from development to accounts, while more lethargic competitors have a policy saying they won’t. I don’t know if that is true reading their marketing slop but that is what they say, so they’re going to reap the benefits later than we do. But, the benefits are there for the taking when they’re ready, and therefore the benefits aren’t really that uniquely valuable long-term. More accurately, the leverage one assumes one is getting doesn’t really exist sustainably.
However, the good news for us, and those who read this blog is that we try to think differently. We try to do what is hard, not what is easy. Emerging technologies are awesome and we’ll embrace them, but often they’re just a stepping stone to something great, not something to be blindly consumed and resold. With limited exceptions (and a healthy dose of expectation!) Simwood customers are builders who add value and emerging technologies, both those in the wider market and those we’re developing (like Conversational AI) have the power to change the world and many of you are embracing it. We’re hearing of amazing applications from really creative people and a lot less of the “who can I sell it to?” type questions; and to be clear, this is from all technical levels of our customer base including those who may otherwise choose to be offended by this blog as being “resellers”. We’ve made it very easy for you to add value at every level but the will to do so has to be yours.
As we move forward, remember that what was valuable before is being democratised and is not valuable any longer. As we drown in AI-generated slop and ever more niche products and services of very questionable underlying origin, the winners will be those who add value and they will be those who do what is hard and rare. Increasingly, anyone can do what is easy.
Onwards!
