The market has often been compared to a jungle; there is nothing original about that. It is clear that in the marketplace the strong eat the weak. It is also clear that at least in many cases the young displace the old as pack leader. It is not difficult to think of General Motors as an aging lion displaced as a leader, or an Alpha in the terms of an animal behaviorist, by a younger lion from another pride. The young lion is Toyota and the "other" pride is named Japan.
What is less obvious is the application of other elements in the Theory of Evolution such as genetic drift to the development of new generations of products. In the Theory of Evolution is based at least in part on the concept that a process of natural selection will occur. In this process organisms with a superior physical makeup will displace similar organisms with inferior physiques. In biology dominant and recessive genes passed from generation to generation control this.
In the market place, this is controlled by sales figures. A case in point is the portable personal music device. The original was the "boombox" nicknamed the "ghetto blaster," (Boombox Museum, n.d.) a by modern standards huge battery powered radio and tape player usually carried on the shoulder of the owner with a speaker turned toward the owners ear and the volume at a level that it could be heard at great distance. While the defining sound of rock music played at high volume pleased the owner there were some "genetic" shortcomings to the device. It was large, heavy, expensive, and the output was somewhat less than personal.
The "boombox" gave way first to small transistor radios carried in a shirt pocket with a single earpiece inserted in the ear and later to a belt hung device called the "Walkman". A Walkman usually had earphones, cans in the vernacular of the aficionados, and was invented by Sony, if its development can be called invention. It was small,
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