In one of its rare product failures, Hewlett-Packard Co is discontinuing its seemingly attractive 20Mb and 40Mb Kittyhawk 1.3 hard disk drives; it will continue to supply the products to its customers on a lifetime-buy programme and will honour warranty and support agreements. The reason the drives, made for the company by Citizen Watch Co, are being abandoned is that the target markets for drives – parts of the mobile computing market and non-traditional markets – have not materialised to the degree that the company and industry analysts expected. Although the Kittyhawk won the largest market share of the sub-2 drive market with 28% of the non-captive market in 1993 according to International Data Corp, Hewlett-Packard says sales were not sufficient to justify continued investment.
