Xbox-Miterfinder is supposed to help Amazon to serve product successes

One of the original developers of the Xbox should now ensure that Amazon can finally establish successful new in -house developments on the market. For this he gets a fresh, large department at his side.

Devices and software

The team under the name Zeroone is headed by J Allard, a former Microsoft manager who was significantly involved in the development of the Xbox. According to current job advertisements, Zeroone is active at several locations, including Seattle, San Francisco and Sunnyvale in California. The choice of name – “Zero To One” – symbolizes the mission of the team to accompany completely new product ideas from the first concept phase to the market launch.

Both hardware and software solutions are the focus of development, reported CNBC. Amazon looks back on a changeable story in the field of hardware. Successful products such as the Kindle, the Echo speaker or the Fire TV stick are faced with flops such as the Fire Phone, the fitness tracker Halo or the video telephony device Glow. Many of these products were developed by Lab126, Amazon’s research and development center for hardware in Silicon Valley.

J Allard, who worked at Microsoft for 19 years and acted there as head of technology for consumer products, has been part of the Amazon team since September. He now works directly under Panos Panay, another Microsoft veteran who moved to Amazon in 2023 to lead the device and service division. Although Amazon has so far not published any details about the concrete projects of Zeroone, job advertisements indicate that a new smart home product is being worked on with computer vision technologies. Further tenders speak of user research, concept tests and fast prototyping.

Others suffer

The team is recruited from employees from earlier Amazon projects such as the voice assistant Alexa, the cloud gaming service Luna and the sleeping tracker Halo. Managers of the Lightform startup taken over, which specializes in projection technology, are also involved. While Amazon starts an innovation offensive with Zeroone, personnel were recently dismantled in other areas of the device division.

Around 100 employees were released at the beginning of May, including employees from the Alexa team, the children’s product department Amazon Kids and the Lab126. According to official information, over 50 jobs were affected in Sunnyvale alone.