Hewlett-Packard: The Flight Of The Kittyhawk Analysis

Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk Analysis

Intro – What This Case Is Really About

In 1992, a new and disruptive technology was launched on the market by Hewlett-Packard: the smallest hard drive in the world, known as Kittyhawk. This new product could supply until 20MB of storage in the beginning and its disks had about 1.3 inches of diameter. Further, it had a shock-sensing mechanism that worked much like an airbag on an automobile and prevented any data loss it could have with a maximum of three-foot drop. Spenner, the general manager of DMD wanted that Kittyhawk served not only the computing marketplace but also any product that used a microprocessor. Although the innovation seemed to have an endless market, after two years the hard drive disk was launched, the team of the project realized that maybe they wouldn’t be able to reach their opening targets.

Analysis – The main issues

The team had a good start when they chose to look for the market they best fit on by researching the whole market and trying to understand what were the needs of it. According to Christensen, a disruptive technology requires the location of the initial market. They were also right to discuss it with the mobile computing and the game market because they already have a sort of HP’s connection that could smooth even more their path. The problems begun when they simply ignored the customers’ needs of a cheap and small disk drive and chose a very unclear time to go into the mobile computing market, instead of the notebooks market for example.

The team didn’t realize that sometimes the customers reject a new technology, and one reason for this is that their capability to absolve technological improvements is slower than the speed of the innovation itself. Traditional customers would take a while to adopt a disruptive technology, so Kittyhawk would have to wait for the market to develop and consolidate. That’s why, in my humble opinion, their main mistake was the strategy and all the unreachable targets they defined to the project of this disruptive innovation in that short period. They didn’t even know the customers very well, so the team had to make big and risky decisions about it.

There’s also the fact that their original statement that said “I am going to build a small, dumb, cheap disk drive!” was not performed. The agreement was to bring to market an innovative product, but with a competitive price hovering around US$50. Nevertheless, the team seemed to position the product in the market more like a sustaining technology with a much higher price – instead of keeping the idea of the disruptive one – because it was introducing a package of attributes with not so many differences to the marketplace.

And the first reason for that is that the Kittyhawk’s team probably chose the wrong market to focus on. The mobile computing’s needs involved not only the basic and cheap functions of the hard drive, but more sophisticated roles, as the new substrate material for the disks and the three-foot drop requirement. The second one is the fact that they had the goals to achieve a $100 million revenue rate in two years after launch and to accomplish a break-even time of less than 36 months that made impossible the mission to maintain low prices. Another decisive factor was that the culture