Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks right through an Amazon Units starting match in Fresh York Town, U.S., February 26, 2025.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Amazon‘s gadgets unit has a unused staff tasked with inventing “breakthrough” shopper merchandise that’s being led via a former Microsoft govt who helped form the Xbox.
The ZeroOne staff is unfold throughout Seattle, San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California, and is all in favour of each {hardware} and device tasks, in keeping with process postings from the age future. The identify is a nod to its project of creating rising product concepts from idea to starting, or “zero to one.”
Amazon has a checkered historical past in {hardware}, with hits together with the Kindle e-reader, Echo ingenious speaker and Hearth streaming sticks, in addition to flops just like the Hearth Telephone, Halo condition tracker and Sparkle youngsters teleconferencing instrument.
Lots of the merchandise emerged from Lab126, Amazon’s {hardware} analysis and construction unit, which is based totally in Silicon Valley.
The unused crew is being led via J Allard, who spent 19 years at Microsoft, maximum just lately as era prominent of shopper merchandise, a job he left in 2010, in keeping with his LinkedIn profile. He was once a key architect of the Xbox recreation console, in addition to the Zune, a failed iPod competitor.
Allard joined Amazon in September, and the corporate showed on the presen that he could be a part of the gadgets and products and services staff beneath Panos Panay, who left Microsoft for Amazon in 2023 to manage the gang.
An Amazon spokesperson showed Allard oversees ZeroOne however declined to remark additional at the crew’s paintings.
The process postings serve few explicit information about what ZeroOne is construction, despite the fact that one list references running on “conceiving, designing, and bringing to market computer vision techniques for a new smart-home product.”
Another post for a senior buyer insights supervisor in San Francisco says the process includes proudly 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 outline 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.”
Amazon has pulled in staffers from alternative industry gadgets that experience enjoy creating leading edge applied sciences, together with its Alexa tonality laborer, Luna cloud gaming provider and Halo ease tracker, in keeping with Linkedin profiles of ZeroOne staff. The top of a projection mapping startup known as Lightform that Amazon obtained is helping lead the gang.
Life Amazon is increasing this actual nook of its gadgets crew, the corporate is scaling again alternative boxes of the sprawling gadgets and products and services section.
Previous this future, Amazon laid off about 100 of the gang’s staff. The process cuts integrated staffers running on Alexa and Amazon Youngsters, which develops products and services for youngsters, in addition to Lab126, in keeping with people filings and community habitual with the topic who requested to not be named because of confidentiality. Greater than 50 staff had been laid off at Amazon’s Lab126 amenities in Sunnyvale, in keeping with Colleague Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings in California.
Amazon mentioned the process cuts affected a fragment of a p.c of the gadgets and products and services group, which has tens of hundreds of staff.
