Amazon Services

MIT Technology Review has a article on Amazon and there use of web services. Amazon has been a leader in this for online services - on some level, they give you the tools to make your web site into a direct competitor to them. This is a more workable strategy for Amazon because at the end of the day they get a bite of the pie as part of the order processing infrastructure. This probably won't work for other service oriented companies (for example, ones that are ad driven) unless syndicating the advertisments is tied to using the service.