The best books lead you on to other books and down other rabbit holes…

Last year I read 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, which in turn led me to read ‘Everybody Ought to be Rich’ – the biography of John Jakob Raskob (more on that another time).

I subsequently listened to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s interview on one of my favourite podcasts – The Compound & Friends – where he mentioned that one of his favourite books is Barbarians at the Gate, the story of the RJR Nabisco LBO in the late 80s.

The book is brilliant, as is the TV movie of the book. With this being a typical tongue in cheek moment…

The CMS space has been doing its usual shape‑shifting act, but early 2026 has felt different. Faster. Messier. More interesting. AI is now baked into almost every workflow, and suddenly everyone’s pretending they always planned it this way.

When I look at what’s actually driving the winners, it’s not the usual “market forces” stuff. It’s much simpler: who has momentum, who has the right foundations, and who isn’t tripping over their own legacy.

The first big shift this year has been community velocity. When those AI‑plugin scaffolding tools landed in January, the platforms with big developer ecosystems just took off. WordPress didn’t magically reinvent itself — it just had thousands of people building clever things overnight. Hard to compete with that kind of compounding energy.

Then there’s architecture, which has quietly become the real dividing line. Apple dropped its new spatial content format in February, and the headless platforms were ready almost immediately. Contentful, Sanity, the usual suspects. Meanwhile, the older CMS vendors were still rummaging around in the attic looking for the right extension point.

Trust still plays its part. In the enterprise world, Adobe and Sitecore remain the safe, predictable choices. Our partnership with Adobe is testament to key benefits of their tech.

But the real story of 2026 is the merging of content, data, and AI into one continuous flow. The platforms that make that feel natural are the ones pulling ahead. A CMS isn’t just a publishing tool anymore — it’s becoming the operating system for the whole digital experience.

That’s how the landscape looks from where I’m sitting (Coventry): momentum, foundations, trust, and AI. Everything else is just marketing noise.

As we look back on a year of the Labour government, marked by what seems like an almost typical lack of professionalism by British administrations I’ve been considering the PM.

Keir Starmer seems to treat conviction like a suspicious package—best handled with gloves and disposed of quietly— he’s become the Aaron Burr of British politics. In a world crying out for clarity, he offers caveats. Like Burr, he’s made a lack of clarity, or indeed a downright obfuscation of his governing principles an art-form There’s a line from Hamilton which rings true “If you stand for nothing, what will you fall for?”. That sums up my view of Starmer, in fact it might as well be etched into the despatch box. His principles, if they exist, are Schrödinger’s: simultaneously present and absent, depending on the polling data. And while Burr at least had the decency finally act on principle with a gun, Starmer’s tool of choice is a spreadsheet of focus group results and a weak hand on the tiller, not ideal as we head into choppy waters.

Montaigne by Stefan Zweig

“What do I know?”

Yellowface by Rebecca Kuang

Delighted to launch a new and fully refactored navigation on the Land Rover and Range Rover websites.

This is a globally consistent design for all our markets with four primary tabs, fixed action items and a clearer mega menu structure. We’ve also enabled a Range Rover version including our SV offerings, in contrast to the Land Rover version which leads on Defender and Discovery but references Range Rover (our brand transition is fluid!).

Developed by ITG with support from Accenture and Adobe this is a big improvement on our previous navigation for a host of reasons; technical, UI and commercial / conversion impact.

A Night to Remember – Walter Lord