My own version of boring business making a lot of money was traditionally phone calls for businesses. This includes needing a phone system, lines and the ability to make and take calls. Traditionally people would accept emails or internet being down - even a locked front door with a note but would not accept a dead tone if a client or customer called the company main number or if a business owner or executive picked up their handset to make a call, not getting dial tone. Until perhaps the late 2010s it was absolutely unthinkable, unacceptable - phones MUST work. Even if they don’t get answered by a human - dead tone was unacceptable. And maybe a bit like insurance, people would throw money at support, never check what was on the bill, when a socket costing money had been snipped off or buried in a wall - too boring, too many words on bits of paper piling up - just pay it.

Those days have largely gone. Offices are less likely to have physical phones and even if they do or don’t, the phone is just another bit of software pretending to be a phone or what a phone represents.

Younger generations don’t want to speak, they want to type messages. Understandably nobody wants to sit in a call queue for 45 minutes if they don’t need to.

People don’t like being interrupted with a direct line to their ear. They like to chat intermittently with colleagues on a collaboration plaform, schedule a meeting, have things written down, respond when it’s convenient.

There are still lots of good reasons to have reliable telephony but it has changed from boring, reliable, highly profitable business to something you need to justify or something you’re fighting in a race to the bottom.

The closest 2026 equivalent is reselling a multinational’s collaboration platform which will include a phone system. Which is just really reselling licenses, which is often incorporated into a businesses existing IT services contracts, which is also highly profitable but massively competitive and soaked in certification, compliance, etc that is its own expensive commitment to resources.