when a product or service comes to dominate its market the company that produces it can achieve almost limitless growth and profitability in the weightless economy examples are microsoft s windows operating system google s search engine or android operating system and facebook s social network and advertising platform 
all of these products have substantial ongoing costs related to their management marketing and product enhancements but their production costs are minimal by comparison traditional firms such as manufacturing plants and brick and mortar retailers face more obstacles to growth and profitability due to the higher costs and logistical hurdles they must overcome in order to make their sales real world example of the weightless economythe weightless economy is characterized by information technology and is made possible by intellectual property rights an artist cannot make money selling songs online if their rights to those songs are not protected by copyright laws one of the consequences of the weightless economy is that it permits new entrepreneurs to offer products and services to a large potential customer base with relatively limited barriers to entry for example if coding is part of your skillset you can create a smartphone application and sell it through the apple and android app stores although there are certainly costs involved in doing so those costs pale in comparison to the cost of establishing a factory for example in 2011 garrett gee created a barcode scanning application called scan while he was a student at brigham young university in 2014 he sold the application to snapchat for 54 million although gee is an outlier in having achieved this level of success his story is representative of the kind of success that is made possible by the weightless economy 