>>In a services business, when you give someone $$, you are paying for a person's time. But if we're talking about what was said in the article, and what other

>>In a services business, when you give someone $$, you are paying for a person's time. But if we're talking about what was said in the article, and what others have said in this thread, if you're doing a service company, eventually you want to get the point where your service is automated. In this case, a user is not paying for your time as much as they are paying for the tool you built to encapsulate your service. I see Amazon as more of a service, then. Everything they currently offer (having your own store, payments processing, order fulfillment, etc.) they are able to offer because they can give to their customers via the web what normally a brick and mortar bookstore would have to do manually, and now their only constraint is scaling.