Pardon, I resent that "service if you're from Redmond". In my Mandriva box (and most RH derived distros, AFAIK) you can type
#service crond start|stop
for example, so calling it a service is not Redmon-centric. I would personally define a daemon as a manager of service(s); so that the crond daemon manages the cron service; the xinetd daemon may manage a lot of services, and so on. A bit OT, I guess, sorry.