Case Study: Hewlett Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk Hewlett-Packard decided that in order to grow more rapidly, it needed to design a revolutionary disk drive product that would create an entirely new market or application for the magnetic recording technology. They developed the Kittyhawk in 1992. It was a disk drive that was 1. 3 inches in diameter, supplied 20 megabytes of storage and had unique component ry enabling the drive to withstand a 3 foot drop without any data loss. The possibilities seemed endless, and the Kittyhawk team eagerly anticipated the results of their new innovation. But why did it fail? From a project management point of view Hewlett Packard did everything right: they had set up an autonomous project team, and gave the project heavy senior management support.
The team focused on the emerging personal digital assistant (PDA) market, which in the early 1990’s was believed to have explosive growth potential. As a consequence the team created a product that had incredible shock resistance and low power consumption, and weighed less than an ounce. In terms of field failure it was the most reliable product ever introduced in the disk drive industry. Hewlett Packard created a remarkable new technology, but its targeted market never blossomed. Just at the end of the case as the clock was running out on the Kittyhawk team, Nintendo approached HP with its Nintendo 64 system with a slot for a 1. 3″ disk drive, and projections that it would sell several million units per day during the upcoming Christmas season.
The Research paper on Hewlett-Packard: Case Analysis
... DMD, came to Hewlett-Packard and set up a project working on developing The Kittyhawk. He picked up the project team that meant ... the needs of the Kittyhawk. Eventually, they cooperated with Nintendo to obtain profit on 1.3” disk drive and make it breakeven ... Introduction Hewlett-Packard is a pioneer of printer industry, and they considered getting involved in to the Rigid Disk Drives. It was not ...
The problem was that they needed the drive for $49. 95, and HP had designed the Kittyhawk for a different market at a cost of $250 per unit. The 1. 3 drive was a potentially disruptive technology which could have been designed to a $49. 95 price point, but HP had tried to position the KittyHawk as a sustaining technology as much as possible. Whether a new technology is sustaining or disruptive is often a strategic variable rather than something inherent in the technology itself.
Hewlett Packard took the market’s structure and the needs of the customers it had identified as given, and attempted to push the technology far enough that it addressed those needs. A very different approach would have been to take the disruptive technology’s current capabilities as a given, and then find a market which valued the attributes of the technology which existed at that time. This case is a prime example of the tendency of a successful company trying to force fit a new technology to address the needs of known customers. Often, however, the home run comes when the company discovers or creates a market which values the very different attributes that are enabled by a disruptive technology..
