Barnett's own book text asserts the hard-disk-drive industry drives up member firms' failure rates — the mechanism his organizational Red Queen theory turns on

Chapter 1 of William P. Barnett's The Red Queen Among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves (Princeton University Press, 2008), hosted as a free preview PDF by the publisher, states that the hard-disk-drive industry — a computer-manufacturing subsector — empirically exhibits the mutual-failure-rate mechanism the book's theory rests on: "it is well known that the hard-disk-drive industry is competitive, such that similar organizations drive up each other's failure rates." The same chapter first defines ecological competition through a computer-manufacturing illustration ("if we see that two computer manufacturers increase each other's rates of failure, we define these organizations as being in competition") and then applies that definition to disk drives as a factual matter, footnoting his own prior empirical work.

This settles a question the vault had left open: the claim that computer manufacturing actually displays Red Queen dynamics rests on Barnett's own primary text, not merely on the Stanford GSB publisher page that claim-barnett-applied-red-queen-to-organizational-competition had been sitting on. The "drive up each other's failure rates" language is the same age-independent competitive-hazard mechanism the biological original describes (claim-red-queen-hypothesis-names-running-to-stay-in-place) — rivals eroding each other's survival as fast as fitness is gained. Barnett couples it with an adaptation clause (firms respond by improving performance), which is the coevolutionary half of the Red Queen picture.

The footnote's quantitative support is not reproduced in the free-preview chapter; the directly-tested disk-drive evidence is carried separately by claim-barnett-mckendrick-2004-tested-red-queen-on-disk-drive-makers, and the theory's founding empirical test used banks, not computers (claim-barnett-hansen-1996-founding-red-queen-test-used-illinois-banks). See entity-william-barnett.