Amazon Taps Xbox Co-Founder To Develop 'Breakthrough' Consumer Products (cnbc.com)
- Reference: 0177858585
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/2149241/amazon-taps-xbox-co-founder-to-develop-breakthrough-consumer-products
- Source link: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/amazon-forms-zeroone-team-to-develop-breakthrough-consumer-products.html
> The ZeroOne team is spread across Seattle, San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California, and is focused on both hardware and software projects, according to job postings from the past month. The name is a nod to its mission of developing emerging product ideas from conception to launch, or "zero to one." [...] The new group is being led by J Allard, who spent 19 years at Microsoft, most recently as technology chief of consumer products, a role he left in 2010, according to [2]his LinkedIn profile . He was a key architect of the Xbox game console, as well as the Zune, a failed iPod competitor.
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> Allard joined Amazon in September, and the company confirmed at the time that he would be part of the devices and services team under Panos Panay, who left Microsoft for Amazon in 2023 to lead the group. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed Allard oversees ZeroOne but declined to comment further on the group's work. The job postings provide few specific details about what ZeroOne is building, though one listing references working on "conceiving, designing, and bringing to market computer vision techniques for a new smart-home product." [3]Another post for a senior customer insights manager in San Francisco says the job entails owning "the methodology and execution of concept testing and early feedback for ZeroOne programs." "You'll be part of a team that embraces design thinking, rapid experimentation, and building to learn," the description says. "If you're excited about working in small, nimble teams to create entirely new product categories and thrive in the ambiguity of breakthrough innovation, we want to talk to you."
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> Amazon has pulled in staffers from other business units that have experience developing innovative technologies, including its Alexa voice assistant, Luna cloud gaming service and Halo sleep tracker, according to Linkedin profiles of ZeroOne employees. The head of a projection mapping startup called Lightform that Amazon acquired is helping lead the group. While Amazon is expanding this particular corner of its devices group, the company is scaling back other areas of the sprawling devices and services division.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/amazon-forms-zeroone-team-to-develop-breakthrough-consumer-products.html
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/jallard529/
[3] https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2968064/sr-customer-insights-mgr-amazon-devices-z1-emerging
Amazon is only capable of enshitification (Score:2)
I recently had a displeasure of ordering something on Amazon. In my very specific search I was barraged by unrelated sponsored listings on top of that video ad for another product was displayed in line. I didn't end up buying anything as the result. What are they thinking making buying things so annoying?
Malware you pay for (Score:2)
Every single one of Amazon's hardware products is used to siphon your data and bilge pump ads and product placements to you.
You can argue that's true for all of Amazon's properties at this point.
They've become a behemoth of a company like Microsoft did in the 90s - starting in earnest about 2 years ago, based on what I've seen from those who work there. Their culture has changed and the leadership has all but abandoned the leadership principles.
I'll create a breakthrough product (Score:2)
..through utilization of innovative technology and techniques and we'll have teams too and teams of steaming f#cking innovation. Very innovative products. Like snapping your fingers. Tap me.
Re: (Score:2)
I worked at Amazon for nine years, it was extremely interesting. The company has so much cash that "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" is a valid business model. Anywhere else that I have worked the motto 'Every day is Day One' would be mindless executive-speak, but at Amazon that's the way that big chunks of the company works. Current CEO Andrew Jassey took AWS from the days of "Let's try this, hold my beer!" to the 800-pound gorilla of cloud computing. It was an incredibly interesting job, an
New Amazon Smart-home Products (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, no thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey... they're still better than Google's smart home products. Not that you really need to try very hard to beat the voice recognition of a Google Home device in 2025.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't want any corporation in my home listening and recording everything I do. Can you say creepy?
Re: (Score:2)
Is bandwidth, processing and storage free in your universe? Because it's not in the universe where Amazon operates.
Fire up a Wireshark session on your router's connection and watch the traffic (the devices' MAC address is helpfully printed on them.) There will be regular pings back to the mother ship, until it hears the wake word. Then it buffers the next phrase it hears and sends the encrypted compressed bundle to be analyzed. After that it's back to pings until a response comes in.
Perhaps if you were