But most important, it led the charge towards the new ecosystem-type business, attracting a developer community of hundreds of thousands of people and businesses prepared to pony up to produce for its platform.

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This changes the reef into an entirely new type of ecosystem whose habitat is no longer suitable for many of the fish that once inhabited it.

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This type of ecosystem behaviour is increasingly characterised as fail fast fail cheap, a Darwinian process where projects fail in order that management can refine products and objectives.

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The first thing is that Apple is running a new type of company with economic sub-systems, like the developer ecosystem, that are relatively new to management.

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"It is important because - depending on the rate of change, and the type of species that are found in the forests - it will influence a lot of ecosystem services and processes, " explained co-author Brian Enquist from the University of Arizona.

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