Fighting for a Niche: An Evolutionary Model of Storage

We know intuitively that if two devices, such as HDVD and Blu-Ray discs, have no clear difference in terms of cost, speed, or capacity, one will eventually leave the market. In evolutionary biology, this principle is termed “competitive exclusion”: if species occupy the same environmental niche, one will eventually outcompete the others (though predicting which will live is out of scope, we can see that the niche can only support one). Our wild and crazy plan is to project the future of storage systems by tracking the co-evolution of devices along with the underlying storage marketplace, or our “niche.”