When Japanese manufacturers were the first to generate the highest densities and the lowest cost per GB and in turn beat other nations; manufacturers to the next level of performance, U.S. And westernized nations aggressively used anti-dumping policies through their governments in an attempt to slow down the technological leads in other nations. Yet these same disk drive manufacturers would load up their channels and report shipped storage products as sold on their balance sheets when they had merely been sent to distribution partners. This level of coercive isomorphism became heightened and was driven by manufacturers looking for differentiation through public policy, having exhausted product-related differentiation as products at this point were different only on price and their date of availability. The disk drive industry is a best practices study of mimetic isomorphism. Starting from the entrepreneurs who started the industry including Alan Shugart, a fascinating man with a gift for visualizing entire logic circuits in his head and who worked in IBM's R & D. Center prior to starting Seagate to the vision of Finis Conner who perfected the small disk drive for Compaq (later HP) who also looked to form factors as the mimetic isomorphism-like responses to a growing need for storage capacity. Finis Conner especially looked to differentiation through product intelligence and value of greater integration of product components. This strategy of differentiation through value of electronic components and intelligence through integration were all standard responses to forces on the industry to pursue the trajectory of mimetic isomorphism.

Normative isomorphism also...

One could argue that as price and availability became the sole differentiators the need for the purveyors of normative isomorphism including analysts, accountants, financial and operations experts that continually seek to turn the dynamics of the industry into a science. When reduced to cost reduction assumptions and production curves including media yields for disk surfaces, the storage industry has indeed exemplified the normative isomorphism that besets industries as the innovative minds move into creating entirely new industries and bureaucracy sets in, just as the authors attest to in their article.