The HTC Vive has been on sale for a few months now, and the team behind the kit is growing. Joining that team this month is a former executive from both Microsoft and Amazon.
As spotted by Tech Story, Rahul Sandil has come on board HTC Vive as the Vice President of Global Marketing for the Virtual Reality Store. That’s a fairly self-explanatory role; Sandil will help in advertising Vive games to people, presumably focusing on those that are sold through the company’s dedicated digital download service, Vive Port. That store hasn’t actually launched in many territories yet, but will be seeing a global rollout in the coming weeks and months. Sandil will also help to attract new developers to the platform.
He joins after a nine month stint at Amazon, where he worked as Head of Marketing for the company’s Video Direct services. Before that, Sandil spent nearly two and a half years at Team Xbox at Microsoft as the Head of Customer Acquisition and Engagement. He had been leading marketing for an incubation group within the experiences team for the company’s mixed reality headset, HoloLens, and even worked with Team Dakota on the now-cancelled Project Spark. No doubt his past experience with reality-altering headsets helped him gain his new role.
We expect to see plenty more news like this as the HTC Vive grows over the course of the next few years. HTC has already demonstrated a good deal of confidence in the product by spinning it off into its own subsidiary earlier in the year. On top of that the company is pouring huge amounts of money into its own VR accelerators and other partnerships with venture capital firms. It all goes to show that VR is taking up a major part of the company’s operations, and could well go on to replace phones as its main business in the future.
That’s what we certainly hope to see, anyway.
