---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (Tier 1 — Barnett's own book, Chapter 1, read directly from the publisher-hosted free-preview PDF; extract_pdf reported tls: verified. Queen re-fetch not independently repeated this promotion.)"
source_url: "http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8636.pdf"
source_author: "William P. Barnett"
source_date: "2008-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "For example, it is well known that the hard-disk-drive industry is competitive, such that similar organizations drive up each other's failure rates.6 At the same time, however, organizations in the industry have responded to such competition by adapting in order to improve performance."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-23-does-barnetts-own-data-show-computer-manufacturing-exhibiting.md, 2026-07-27"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-23-does-barnetts-own-data-show-computer-manufacturing-exhibiting.md"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
date_created: "2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["organizational-theory","red-queen","william-barnett","computer-industry","hard-disk-drive-industry","competitive-dynamics"]
---


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]].