Amazon.com is on my mind today. I ordered a book the other day; now that may not sound revolutionary but it was important to me.

My father was a clinical psychologist who died 25 years ago. In the 1960s he wrote a book called “Opening Doors for Troubled People.” I have a copy of the book, but I really would like a couple more copies to give to my kids. In the old, pre-Amazon.com days, I would have been out of luck. I went onto the web the other day and was able to order the very last copy out there. It is ironic—I spend so much of my time analyzing the consequences of emerging distributed technologies on organizations that I sometimes lose sight of some of the subtle human dimensions of this very distributed world. I am very happy to have found this very precious book—thank you Amazon!