And the thoughts entered my head and went right back out.

Oh, but I remembered thinking about “Software Ecosystems”.  They don’t really have predators.  At a PAX panel, the Indie Game panel kept suggesting that a market was “dead” when it had been around for more than a couple of years, was mature, and the killer apps had been written.  Currently that means iPhone and XBLA are “dead” and Android, iPad (to an extent) and Facebook are the “targets”, because nobody’s yet written The Game Everyone Plays.

Question raised, to my mind: does this mean that a software ecosystem could be made to evolve via Extinction Level Events, like how Magic rotates cards out of the game in the Type II format?  Every once in a while a “kill switch” is sent to a bunch of old apps and the space needs to be filled?

Maybe that can happen by adding a core feature (or changing it) within the platform, breaking the old apps.  Particularly easy when you have mandatory OS upgrades.