Kittyhawk

Analysis of the theories applicable to Hewlett-Packard Before all engineers could join the Kittyhawk team, they were required to sign a creed “I’m going to build a small, dumb, cheap disk drive.” It presented that the team members valued the demands of customers. In terms of technology, the team achieved their goal by producing Kittyhawk, which could be the smallest hard disk drive in the world. However, the Kittyhawk project failed for several reasons. First, Seymour and White wrongly predicted that personal digital assistants (PDAs) were going to be the next big innovation. They ignored the desktop and notebook computer sections which resulted in Kittyhawk losing a number of potential customers. They did not focus on the need from Nintendo and created strategy goals due to inadequate market research. For instance, Seymour and White presented to Hewlett-Packard that they would sell a drive for $49.95. But by the end of the project, the cost of producing Kittyhawk was too high so the team could not sell a disk drive for less than $130. Secondly, the project’s goal was too idealistic and difficult to attain. According to the article, the goal was to accomplish a break-even time of less than 36 months, generate $100 million revenue rate in two years, and become a leader in the disk-drive market. The team developed the project which did not take the customers’ need so it resulted in the project’s failure to meet its goals. If the Kittyhawk team had researched the hard-drive market and listened to the needs of customers more thoroughly, they could have avoid this project’s failure. Another mistake was that customers don’t know how to apply the new technology. Customers may not accept the product when it is launched. The innovation needs to take time for a while to develop in the market. In this case although the team did some market researches, the product was too new to gain the demand of customers.