The Flight of Kittyhawk Case Analysis

Analysis of Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk

Introduction and Background of the case

In 1991, In order to grow more rapidly, HP’s Disk Memory Division (DMD) decide to launch a new disk-drive which is the smallest one in the world, named Kittyhawk. a 1.3” disk drive. At that time, DMD had a profitable position within the market with its 5.25 and 3.5 inch disk drive which concentrated on high-performance products, but the manager Spenner realized there are many strong competitors fighting in the market such as Conner, Quantum, and Western Digital. It’s better to create a new disk-drive with an innovative design could take the computing market by storm rather than developing disk drives with even higher memory capacity. Therefore HP set out to create a small disk drive that would serve new potential market. The Kittyhwak team was given autonomy to develop the drive, find new markets, and cultivate a customer base, along with the support of HP’s CEO. DMD gathered all the resources they need to achieve the goal. But the results are not as what they expected. The new 1.3’’disk drive is still difficult to enter the Market.

Detail analysis of the failure of Kittyhawk

In the course of their market research, there are some facts we have to pay attention to. This fact is just why the kittyhawk project has failed.

Firstly, the Nintendo marketing manager is very interested in the small storage device on the Nintendo exhibition, and the capacity of 1.3’’ disk drive worked very well for their games. But the marketing only have one request that the cost of the disk drive can’t be more than $50 dollar.

But they did not meet Nintendo’s request of $50 per disk drive and ended up with $250, which is very unfortunate since Nintendo offered a very good opportunity for kittyhawk to start a market. Actually I think kittyhawk is a potentially disruptive technology, which could have been designed in a price of $50. One factor that drove up the price was the...