Facebook is shuffling some employees around as it looks to bring some consistency to the many consumer-facing hardware projects it currently has going on. Leading the efforts, the company has now announced, is Andrew Bosworth, an executive with more than 10 years of service to the company since he joined back in 2006. Bosworth’s prior role as Vice President of Ads and Business Platform will now be filled by Mark Rabkin. With the company’s next big event – the Connect developer conference – scheduled to take place in October, Bosworth will likely have his work cut out for him.
Facebook has not, in the meantime, offered any further details on any specific projects that will be overseen by Bosworth. With that said, he will ultimately need to ensure that the experience across each device is familiar to users of Facebook’s software platforms and to users of the company’s other hardware devices. Aside from Oculus and its Rift VR platform, which is wholly owned by Facebook, the company is also rumored to be working on a relatively large number of hardware-related projects. Not least of all, that reportedly includes an Amazon Echo Show competitor in the form of a video chat-enabled device which could be revealed as early as the Connect conference. Other purported projects range from smart speakers to personal assistant devices and a 360-degree camera. The company is even rumored to be working on its own modular smartphone.
What makes Bosworth’s job likely to be difficult is that, according to a Facebook spokesperson, the new position was created to help bring unification across the company’s VR, AR, and consumer hardware divisions. It can be presumed that, in order to accomplish that, Bosworth will need to act as an intermediary connection point between those filling leadership positions within each individual unit. He will effectively be bringing the teams closer with more interaction between them, as well as more consistency to the projects the teams are working on. What could make the job especially difficult is that his job will ultimately be to help Facebook’s hardware projects ” move even faster, ” to keep in line with the company’s investments in in its “10-year roadmap.”