Great Tech War Continues: Google Takes A Top Engineer From Microsoft

Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a “respected engineer and software designer at Microsoft,” is headed to Google, where he’ll be a top-level software engineer.

Agüera y Arcas was responsible for many different projects at Microsoft, including Photosynth, an experiment in 3-D panoramas, and Bing maps, where he was a “top figure” during the development phase.

On his blog, Agüera y Arca wrote:

On one hand, of course this is tremen­dously excit­ing; Google is a com­pany of grand ambi­tions and bril­liant peo­ple. On the other hand it has been hard–very hard–to detach emo­tion­ally from Microsoft. The company’s lead­er­ship has been con­sis­tently good to me over these past eight years, and it has been a time filled with cre­ativ­ity and growth and good friends. It’s painful to leave behind so many won­der­ful ongo­ing projects, and even more so to leave behind such a great team.

The hard­est deci­sion of my life.

The move to Google will be a significant loss for Microsoft, and a big win for the search giant, and due to the fierce rivalry between the two firms, it’s also a controversial move. Apple, Google, Adobe, and other firms have been investigated in recent years for their policies concerning “no hire” agreements between each other, which may have violated anti-trust laws due to the limits they place on individual employee careers.KE