Marc Whitten, a longtime Xbox Live leader who was most recently chief product officer at Sonos, is now working as an executive at Amazon, GeekWire has confirmed.
Whitten spent 17 years at Microsoft, including four years as chief product officer during the Xbox One launch before taking on the same role at Sonos in 2014. He left Sonos this past March and joined Amazon in June as a “VP & GM,” according to his LinkedIn profile.
Sources say Whitten is working on Amazon’s Fire TV business, building on his past experience in streaming services and consumer hardware.
Whitten oversaw the launch of speaker hardware and tuning software at Sonos, whose CEO cited the rising popularity of Amazon’s Alexa and the Echo device when announcing a round of layoffs four months ago. “Alexa/Echo is the first product to really showcase the power of voice control in the home,” Sonos CEO John MacFarlane wrote.
Meanwhile on Twitter, Whitten is still showing support for his former colleagues:
Great job on the new S @xbox peeps. Looks really nice!
— Marc Whitten (@notwen) June 13, 2016
Great to see my Sonos peeps! @Patrick_Spence @mashupmartin @dddmitri @fiede @joyehoward Looks (&sounds) awesome!
https://t.co/1p4ywKuLe7— Marc Whitten (@notwen) July 12, 2016
