Hewlett-Packard: the Flight of the Kittyhawk Case Analysis

Kittyhawk is 1.3-inch hard-drive disk that HP trying to put up to the new market. HP tries to target a new market and earning profitable revenue from it. Even though the idea of this project is clever but the project failed in the end. The start of the Kittyhawk actually goes well. It has the support from the senior management. HP set up a special group which focus on the project to distinction from the main products that HP already had and the group separate from the company which give them freedom to develop the hard drive. They try to control their product in a time manner because they understand the technology change fast and once it change. It might lead to the failure of their product. Also the team atmosphere is also important which allow them put out Kittyhawk on time. The team work hard to achieve their goal and they did actually put on many different innovations such as the glass disk substrate, the drive need less power which compare to other drive is much more lighter. HP put lot of effort on this project in order to find other potential markets. The idea is good but still this project failed in the end because of several reasons. There are several factors led it failed including not understand their potential customer, disruptive technology need time for their market and setting their goals for their disruptive technology. The Kittyhawk team did not found the right customer for their product. It’s a bad decision that they didn’t check the desktop and notebook computer sections of the show but went straight forward for mobile computing. Because of their product is a new technology at the time, it’s hard to know what customer need and when is the right time for the market. I also think that they didn’t hold their opportunity with Nintendo which might have lead them success. Because what Nintendo wants is what the original strategy for Kittyhawk which is “a cheap, small disk drive.” Instead of going after Nintendo, they choose to go for an upper