Hewlett Packard: Flight of the Kittyhawk

Hewlett Packard: Flight of the Kittyhawk

Introduction

Hewlett Packard (HP) group is one of the world’s leading computer centers which embrace innovations at all levels in their technological advancements. It is considered the technology giant which shines the spotlight on innovations in the world of computers. The HP Disk Memory Storage Division (DMD) can generate an idea for someone. These ideas come with great and high-quality technology to attract as many customers in the market as possible. This effort to attract as many customers positions the products by the HP group in the competitive world markets. The Kittyhawk is a product from the HP group launched in 1992 (Rogers, 6). It acted as a full testament of the DMD innovative minds which engineered its production. It was a product deemed to offer a solution as far as the data security and transmission are concerned. The product delivered 20 megabits per second storage, it was at the prime capitalization of the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) market segment and it also withstood the 3-foot drop without data loss. This case study analysis seeks to draw the understanding of the product’s soft-landing in the global markets by establishing a rationale for the positioning of the product, leadership, customer development and self-conditioning.

Strategic Positioning

Porter’s Model

The Kittyhawk form the DMD was launched with lots of excitement form the HP users. This excitement gathered praise from the HP printer customers who considered it a complementary good. Besides, the product launch was upheld by the industry analysts, the multiple industry awards and the technology media for its appealing design. In terms of the products positioning in the market, there are three basic strategic positioning frameworks which are upheld. One is the Porter’s Strategy Model, Disruption, and Network effects. The Porter’s mode covers there major principles in product positioning (Rogers, 11). First is the Unique and Valuable Position. In this position, the DMD’s commitment was concentered on the PDA market segment. To achieve this, it required specific design for the Kittyhawk to achieve relevancy in the market. This was done by developing the drop protection to prevent data loss, a respectable amount of data storage (20Mbs). HP considered the gap that existed in the world market of computers and leveraged the broad needs of the customers. The second component in the porter’s model is the Strategic Trade-Offs. This was achieved by designing the Kittyhawk to meet the requirements which had been compromised by the PDA market.

The team under the cartridge manufacturers had compromised the ability to develop the relevant products which would grow the customers’ segment. The core section of this trade-off is the incorporation of the accelerometer to remedial the drop requirements. This component would keep the Kittyhawk pricing a notch higher than the desired prices for the cartridge manufacturers regardless of the unit cost of innovations (Rogers, 15). The third component of Porter’s model is the Integration with the Company Activities. Here, the team realized that the HP itself is a difficult measure of the final principle. Many of the business units in the company seemed uncorrelated to its printer business. Thus, in terms of furthering the success to the short and long-term positioning appears to be disconnected. In fact, some of the tea members like Spenner wanted to escalate the DMD’s market share to support the integration into the Kittyhawk. The company emphasized on the support integration of the Kittyhawk into the HP itself to establish the influence required on the industry standards.

Network effects

In regards to the network effects, the Kittyhawk direct attract the traits of the traditional network effects due to its nature. Nevertheless, there are contrasting ideas to the “winner-take-most” common in the products experiencing this type of effect (Rogers, 17). The cartridge manufacturers designed their products to accurately accommodate the Kittyhawk within the physical structures ensure inclusivity.

Disruptive technology

Under the disruptive technology, the Kittyhawk is evaluated using four basic criteria deterring this type of technology. The four criteria include the following.

1. Fail: Non-mainstream valuation of attributes. The customers targeted for the initial market were not traditionally mainstream although they were the existent customers for the initial market.
2. Pass: The launched attributes have an existent market. There was a perception of the high demands of the Kittyhawk not considering the PDA market age.
3. Pass: Rapid improvement of valued performance attributes. In the next three years from the year of launching, the storage capacity for the Kittyhawk was anticipated to increase ten times improving its capability. Even though there were some doubts about the product ability, there was an improvement in its storage to 40Mbs within a year.
4. Fail: Due to low market potential, the development is financially unattractive. The competitors would deploy the resources to deliver the form factor of the Kittyhawk. However, the innovations in the DMD’s Resource and Development team assisted HP to deliver these services before any other industry.

Product Development (Team, Execution, and Technology)

During the development of the Kittyhawk, there was a complete evolution in the project execution, the team formulation and the technological advancements for HP. The rationale for the development of the Kittyhawk consisted of the five objectives of the project charter created by Spenner (Rogers, 22). Nevertheless, I will only consider three major ones which played a major role in finding the product-market-fit. They include the Break-Even Time (BET) which was less than three years, a hindered million dollar revenue after two years after the launch and the 35% revenue growth rate.

Team

Kittyhawk represented a new product line to the rival HP dominate printer enterprises according to Spenner. He received support from the Executive VP of Computer Products Organization Dick Hackborn. Also in Spenner’s support was Ray Smelek the General Manager of the Mass Storage Product Group. The company also supplied an enormous budget for the development of Kittyhawk obtained from the 1 GB and 2GB products. Spenner as the team manager, moved his men to pick the employees from the DMD through a hiring process (Rogers, 27). Part of this process was targeting employees constrained by the HP bias disk speed and route them out. All the engineers joining the team were required to sign a creed asserting “I am going to build a small, dumb, cheap disk drive!”

Execution

The team discovered an existing gap in the computer in the form of the cartridge games by the manufacturers (Nintendo game cartridges). The market demand at the time was, however, unattainable at $50 price point. This ensured the Nintendo’s are eliminated to pave way for the Spenner’s Break Even Time (BET) which anticipated to take less than three years. The team was focused to launch the Kittyhawk in the mobile computing market while the tea hoped to deliver cheaper price point though. HP hired an independent market research company to identify the potential customers in the market (Rogers, 28). The PDA market was full of the infant companies according to the rest of the hired firm. They then spent much time taking the issues of the Kittyhawk team than any other team in the field. This fact propelled the firm into the monumental market through strategic inflations. This formed the basis of the execution procedures for Kittyhawk.

Technology

The technologies employed to meet the product demands in terms of its development included Disk Substrate Material, the electronic integration, and the six-axis piezoelectric accelerometer. In the Disk substrate material, the disk thickness was made equivalent to razor-thin foil. The team developed a new glass substrate since the usual aluminum was too weak at the specified thickness (Rogers, 31). The team had a belief that it would enable the drive to reach the anticipated capacity of 200Mb. Between twenty to thirty chops were used to manage the drives’ operations and computer interface. The Kittyhawk team used several custom-designed circuits on five chips. This would produce a better functioning drive consuming less power at an affordable cost to arrive at the electronic integration. The team also needed to ensure a spinning drive and fragile would have a disk dropped on it and no data loss experienced (Rogers, 35). Thus they developed a shock-sensing component to predict potential impact by monitoring multi-axis acceleration spikes. When triggered, the drive would commence data protection process to ensure the safety of the data.

Leadership Styles

Kittyhawk team was led by strong personalities who drove the dreams of the team forward. In this regard, I will use the John Kotter’s framework for differentiating management and leadership. This model is useful in examining both Spenner and Seymour, the team leaders of Kittyhawk. According to Kotter, a leader would prepare the organization for change, cope with the change, motive and inspire workforce, align the workforce, set the strategies and company directions. A manager, on the other hand, would set targets and goals, organize a capacity building team, monitor the overall process and cope with the complexity (Rogers, 33). From this evaluation, Seymour was much of a manager than a leader while Spenner was much into leadership than management.

Proposals and Recommendation

The sales of the Kittyhawk were only a fraction of the projections, the team, therefore, settled on some proposals to assists in achieving the set market objectives. One was to shut down the Kittyhawk product lines. There was a proposal to start venturing into the rugged 1.3-inch disk as a strategic roadmap to high production volumes, the pursuance of the price point of $50 and the pivot to 2.5-inch Disk (Rogers, 38). With these proposals, there followed a recommendation to improve the Kittyhawk. Suppose the team is determined to pursue the strategy that the Kittyhawk has had in time and has kept it alive in the international markets, the team should consider pivoting the existing technology to a premium 2.5-inch drive for the notebook market.

Work cited

Rogers, Gregory C., and C. Christensen. “Hewlett Packard; The Flight of the Kitty           Hawk.” Harvard Business School Case Study (reprinted in Robert A. Burgelman, Clayton        M. Christensen, and Steven C. Wheelwright (eds)(2004) Strategic Management of             Technology and Innovation, 4th edn, New York: McGraw-Hill, pp.  (6–40) (2010).