Hewlett Packard: The Flight of KittyHawk

Case Study: Hewlett Packard:
The Flight of the Kittyhawk
Hewlett-Packard decided that in order to grow more rapidly, it needed to design a revolutionary disk drive product that would create an entirely new market or application for the magnetic recording technology. They developed the Kittyhawk in 1992. It was a disk drive that was 1.3 inches in diameter, supplied 20 megabytes of storage and had unique componentry enabling the drive to withstand a 3 foot drop without any data loss. The possibilities seemed endless, and the Kittyhawk team eagerly anticipated the results of their new innovation. But why did it fail?
From a project management point of view Hewlett Packard did everything right: they had set up an autonomous project team, and gave the project heavy senior management support. The team focused o...