“In a mature natural ecosystem, it’s difficult for a new species
to get a foothold, because every niche is already filled with one
or more other creatures or plants, each of whose development has
been optimized to maximally exploit that niche. The same tends to
be true in a mature commercial system as well, where launching a
disruptive technology requires great coordination among competitors
in order to displace an incumbent, as I pointed out in my last blog
entry, titled Standards and Disruptive Technologies.“But – in nature, this stable applecart is regularly and
frequently (in geologic time, that is) upset by a variety of
causes…”