I’ve spent much of my Memorial Day Holiday here in the United State pondering the Red Queen Effect vs. network effects, seminal laws of technology and business both, that are often held as gospel by their adherents who believe they are the natural and intrinsic properties of their operating environments (digital ecosystems in this case.)

Both hypotheses apply to any connected, relatively closed environment of some kind, which very much includes everything from marketplaces, online communities, app stores, cloud services, SaaS, enterprise social networks, social media, cable/video networks to e-mail, telephones, and package delivery. I cite these, as many of them don’t look at system concepts when trying to figure out why they aren’t succeeding as hoped, despite those very ideas defining the rules of the playing field.

Both Red Queen and network effects have years of rigorous research and thinking to back them up, and as far as…