Key MS engineer leaving the company to join Google

Blaise Agüera y Arcas, now a former engineer at MS has left the company to join Google for his future work. He has quite the name at MS and will surely be missed. Blaise Agüera y Arcas originally joined MS in 2006 when his startup company Seadragon was bought.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas helped develop several key things at MS such as Bing Maps service and newly launched image-stitching Photosynth software. According to a report from New York Times, the former-MS engineer will continue his career at Google and will help the search giant on machine learning. This is another area that MS has been focusing heavily in recent months. Losing a key engineer at this time is unfortunate for MS, however, Google can rejoice as it has won over a very important individual.

In Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s blog post, he says that “it’s painful to leave behind so many won­der­ful ongo­ing projects, and even more so to leave behind such a great team.“ He continues on to say that leaving MS was “the hard­est deci­sion of my life.“ This isn’t a surprise seeing as he has spend quite a number of years at MS. After all, if you work at a place for many year, you tend to develop a bond not only with the coworkers, but also with the company.

Employee poaching is very common amongst big companies. There have been agreements made between companies such as Google, MS and Apple, however at times, the agreement is broken. Perhaps this is one of those times. Nonetheless, Google has gained a key engineer that help with its future successes.

Want to see the new Photosynth in action? Click on this image of St. Bonaventure Church to give it a road test.

ORIGINAL: Tech Savvy

by Hamza K
Dec 16, 2013