From the Business Model - WhatBusiness Model? department comes a comment by Candice Carpenter, founder and chief executive of women's Web portal site iVillage. She's in the news because she's departing her post to pursue other ventures, but staying on at iVillage as chairwoman. In an interview this week in the Internet industry magazine the Industry Standard, she was asked to pick the people she thought were the most powerful folks in the Net world, and explain why.

"Steve Case (CEO of AOL), Tim Koogle (CEO of Yahoo) and Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) for proving the Internet business model," she says. Please excuse The Margin while we put on our rose-tinted Ray-Bans to absorb this more fully. Er, Amazon is in big trouble, Yahoo is in slightly less trouble, and both have a "business model" that may completely run out of cash within the year, according to several high-profile reports by industry analysts.

AOL is the only company with a functional (i.e. profitable) business plan, but it helps the bottom line when you've got big enough to be able to buy a profitable print and entertainment goliath (Time-Warner) as well, doesn't it?