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laser jet division is headed, will probably become small. One of HP’s businesses may, in the end, havekilled another. But had HP not set up its ink-jet business as a separate organization, the ink-jettechnology would probably have languished within the mainstream laser jet business, leaving one ofthe other companies now actively competing in the ink-jet printer business, such as Canon, as a seriousthreat to HP’s printer business. And by staying in the laser business, as well, HP has joined IBM’smainframe business and the integrated steel companies in making a lot of money while executing anupmarket retreat. 16Figure 5.4 Speed Improvements in InkJet and LaserJet PrintersSource: Hewlett-Packard product brochures, various years.NOTES1. The theory of resource dependence has been most thoroughly argued by Jeffrey Pfeffer and GeraldR. Salancik in The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1978).2. This implies that, in managing business under both normal conditions and conditions of assault by adisruptive technology, the choice of which customers the firm will serve has enormous strategicconsequences.3. Joseph L. Bower, in Managing the Resource Allocation Process (Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin,1972), presents an elegant and compelling picture of the resource allocation process.4. Chester Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938),190–191.5. Quantum’s spin-out of the Hardcard effort and its subsequent strategic reorientation is an example ofthe processes of strategy change described by Robert Burgelman, in “Intraorganizational Ecology ofStrategy-Making and Organizational Adaptation: Theory and Field Research,” Organization Science100