Kittyhawk

The Flight of the Kittyhawk

Introduction

Hewlett Packard (HP) is a highly successful company that has excelled in multiple markets. In 1992 they released the smallest hard disk drive on the market, the Kittyhawk. The Kittyhawk was a disruptive technology, and HP had wagered heavily on its success. Two years later the Kittyhawk core team assembled to weigh options for the future of the disruptive product because they had failed to meet expectations. There were several reasons for this failure.

Resources, Values and Processes

HP increased revenues from 4.7 billion in 1983 to 16.4 billion in 1992. This remarkable growth was largely due to the phenomenal combination of resources, values and processes in place at HP:

- Resources

o Talented high-end engineers

o Quality leadership focused on innovation

o Brand Name

o Relationships with suppliers and customers

- Values

o HP Culture deeply valued technical innovation

o Concentrate on high-performance products

o Healthy profit margins

o Higher capacity megabytes than the competition

o Sought after projects were next generation drives (higher Capacity faster access)

o Projects must meet quick break-even

- Processes

o Management by objective – focus businesses on financial goals and people on potential paths to innovation & strategies to achieve these goals

o Decentralized organizational structure – allows businesses freedom of decision-making and movement

Resources – As identified above, HP had talented engineers and a leadership team that valued innovation, but the Kittyhawk team had little experience in what they were being tasked to accomplish. According to Christensen “these core members were not necessarily experienced in developing new architectures or cultivating emerging markets” Seymour “never led the development of a new architecture” (p. 4)....