Barnett & McKendrick (2004) tested the Red Queen model on hard-disk-drive-maker data, finding large firms led the technology race but failed to become stronger competitors than small rivals

William P. Barnett & David G. McKendrick, "Why Are Some Organizations More Competitive than Others? Evidence from a Changing Global Market," Administrative Science Quarterly 49(4):535–571 (2004), is the paper that most directly puts computer-manufacturing data behind Barnett's organizational Red Queen claim. Per the authors' own abstract (Stanford GSB faculty publication page), the study uses "data on hard disk drive manufacturers" and finds that "although large organizations are likely to do well in technology contests, they also are... likely to become weak competitors over time compared with small organizations" — "Large organizations led the technology race in this market yet failed to develop [into stronger competitors]."

The finding is a specific, non-obvious result: technological leadership did not translate into growing competitive strength for large firms relative to smaller rivals. This is the directional opposite of a naive "bigger is always a stronger competitor" account, and it is consistent with the Red Queen logic that competitive exposure — which insulated large firms may partly escape — is what builds competitive strength, not size or technological lead per se. It is the empirical, directly-tested complement to Barnett's own book-text assertion that the disk-drive industry "drive[s] up each other's failure rates" (claim-barnett-book-text-asserts-disk-drive-industry-drives-up-failure-rates), and it sits on a different industry and dataset than the theory's founding test on Illinois banks (claim-barnett-hansen-1996-founding-red-queen-test-used-illinois-banks).

The directional finding clears the Tier 1–2 floor for a technical-mechanism claim. The specific statistics do not: no coefficients, hazard ratios, sample size, or years-of-data were recovered, so the note stays seedling and carries [unverified-quant — needs primary]. Verification — a direct read of the full ASQ paper — is routed to question-verify-barnett-mckendrick-2004-disk-drive-hazard-estimates. Together with the book text, this note answers the vault's standing question of whether computer manufacturing's Red Queen behavior is Barnett's own data or only the publisher's framing: claim-barnett-applied-red-queen-to-organizational-competition. See entity-william-barnett.