Hewlett-Packard: the Flight of the Kittyhawk Case Analysis Essay

The major threats that we can discern is the fact that the technology is revolutionary in itself and that those types of technological advances are most of the time adopted by early visionaries. Furthermore explaining the technology to potential clients can become a challenge because the clients themselves don’t know what they are looking for and might also not be willing to consider the expenditures involved in such a project.

While it may sense in the short-term foreseeable future, for long term survival USS would need to embrace the disruptive technology.

“Bill Hewlett & Dave Packard founded Hewlett Packard (HP) in a one-car garage in 1939. Its first product was an audio oscillator which was used as an electronic test instrument by sound engineers. Its first customer was Walt Disney Studios. For the first twenty years, HP’s products were predominantly electronic test & measuring instruments for engineers & scientist. Since then HP has added computers, calculators, medical electronic equipment, instrumentation for chemical analysis & solid-state components. In 1980 sales had grown at a compounded rate of 23% over the last decade whereas net profits had compounded at 27%. Such a growth was consequently followed by the increasing number of employees which rose to 57,000 across the world. There are currently twenty manufacturing locations across United States & eight others around the world.” (Beer, Michael, & Richard, 1982)

The last complication leading to the Kittyhawk projects demise came from the customers themselves. After the launch of the first Kittyhawk hard drive, many new unexpected customers stepped forward to show interest. This situation became the proverbial carrot-on-a-stick for the Kittyhawk team. However, none of these customers provided sure sources of revenue by entering into

HP did many things correctly when addressing the challenges for disruptive change. For instance, they organized a smaller team of “hungry” individuals from marketing, manufacturing, and research and development that moved the project away from the core group essentially acting as a small startup business. The smaller group was motivated to establish itself and prove their product was worthy of funding and upper management support. They also differentiated themselves by choosing team members that were uninterested in maintaining status in the company mainstream way of thinking. HP allowed a lot of leeway to the Kitty Hawk team in making decisions and providing financial backing to the project’s

All of these technological advances by HP receive the attention of Japan and China where HP expanded in hopes of continuing to invent newer and better technologies in the future. Since the 90’s HP has gone on to invent many other firsts like the first all-in-one device and is the first company to recycle ink cartridges. They have also acquired many smaller companies like Snapfish and Compaq to grow the company to being one of the industry leaders in personal computing. (Hewlett-Packard, 2013).

The technology can be and will be improved every day. Continuous testing and research and development will keep us ahead of the curb as well as having the right people to engineer solutions. As a small firm taking on big industry we expect the reward to be great. The fact that our brand has not been around for generations will be a hurdle to get across. Good business is good business and if we take care of

This sourcing strategy report represents the result of our analysis of four potential suppliers both domestic and international in an attempt of the company to outsource many key product components and subassemblies, including the 9000x series DVD drives. The identified suppliers include:

It is very clear that it takes more than great ideas in order to stay on top in the technology arena. Competition is never ending and sometimes a company can spend more time keeping the competition away then improving on their vision. The videos “Browser Wars” and “Search” conveyed that as young upstart companies worked to get their ideas out into the marketplace.

The initial Kittyhawk project did not go as planned, but we were able to discover the true market for our product in the process. We need top management’s support to continue this project. To help mitigate the risks and investment costs, we have partnered with Nintendo. This partnership will not only provide additional R&D resources, but will also supply a built-in large-scale customer for our $50 drives.

Organizations must carefully invest in changing technologies to earn a profit. It is hard to estimate the technical success of a product and its market success. It is necessary that organizations recognize opportunities and threats, and generate moves that can facilitate successful commercialization. It is impossible to predict what will happen next in the market, so organizations must carefully invest and should be prepared for both the positive and negative outcomes as well as some surprises. To foresee the future and manage uncertainty organizations follow certain frameworks like following trends, relying on an expert’s opinion, conducting industrial analysis, searching for analogies from the past and constructing scenarios. All these frameworks rely on the past patterns and the present market conditions to analyze the future, but its certain that past does not fully reproduce itself in the future. These frameworks also help us to compare the events in the past to the events in future

Our intentions are to dominate the low features/quality market, but do not want to go head-to-head with another team that gets there first. Moving to another sector in the 1-2, 2-1, or possibly 1-3 will be our backup options, we feel strongly that we will be able to produce enough product to achieve market penetration. This will be achieved during model 3 launch.

In 1992, Hewlett Packard made the decision to produce 1.3 inch disk drives, leapfrogging over the 1.8 inch format to position themselves as market leaders for the smaller drive. Prior to this time, HP prided itself on its leadership position within this industry and its ability to innovate more quickly than its competitors. However, the Disk Memory Division (DMD) was lagging behind the company standard, comprising only 3.2% of total HP revenues in 1992. HP was trying to use the Kittyhawk project to propel the company into a higher profile position within the disk drive market.

After analyzing the results from the previous quarter, it was determined that the prices set for each segment were not sufficient. Product sales priority were also not properly adjusted. With the R&D investments, sales priorities needed to be changed for the main focus to become the most profitable market segments. Prices were not competitive which in turned decreased revenue, market share, and profitability. To become more competitive we altered the prices in each market segment. The Workhorse product was the first to change, the price was lowered to $2500 in an attempt to increase sales; at this price Team 4 was still making a profit on this product, as well as making the price much more competitive. The Workhorse sales priority was also lowered to 3rd in Americas and 4th in APAC and EMEA. This product was not selling as well as we had hoped, and was no longer as profitable as it once was which led to this decision. Next, the Innovator product’s price was adjusted; this involved a price increase to $4100. This price was adjusted to include the new

When setting out to find a market for Kittyhawk, there were several correct and incorrect decisions that the DMD division made that greatly affected their product and its future effectiveness. They initially went about it the right way by researching the electronics industry and the several companies within the industry that might want their new product. They also spent time analyzing HP’s future product plans and how they aligned with that of Kittyhawk’s. They looked into businesses where their innovative and disruptive product may have a greater demand and be better able to quickly incorporate