LinkedIn profiles have a lot to say…
According to former employees, about 100 people have already switched to Meta from Microsoft alone. Meanwhile, Apple offers generous bonuses to keep its employees.
According to former Microsoft employees cited by The Wall Street Journal, about 100 people left the tech giant’s augmented reality team there last year to join Meta Platforms. They said Meta focused specifically on hiring people who worked on Microsoft HoloLens headsets for augmented reality (AR).
According to the WSJ, Linkedin profiles show that more than 70 people who were part of the Microsoft HoloLens team have left the project in the past year, and more than 40 of them have taken on new Meta positions.
Since Microsoft was the first to enter the AR field, its employees became valuable to Meta. Over five years ago, in 2016, Microsoft announced Project HoloLens, a technology that has evolved into one of the most advanced headphones in the world.
Apple is trying to offset the brain drain to Meta by offering lucrative stock options and bonuses worth between $50,000 and $180,000, according to a Bloomberg report. At the end of December 2021, the company offered the rewards to an engineering team dedicated to designing silicon, hardware and some software operations.
Meta Platforms was formerly known as Facebook until a massive rebranding campaign in October 2021, when the company signaled its growing ambitions outside of social media. Reality Labs, in the field of virtual reality hardware, has been working hard in the months since, and in mid-November 2021 successfully completed a “touch glove” virtual reality prototype.
Despite these early successes, Meta-centric attempts to dominate the metaverse drew significant criticism in the broader community, which includes leaders in crypto, NFT, blockchain, and GameFi.
Microsoft and Apple have been looking at the metaverse for a long time. In early November 2021, Microsoft announced a series of Teams and Xbox game console updates in this direction, as well as a new product called Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces.
“The metaverse allows us to embed real-world computing and embed the real world into computing. Most importantly, we are able to take our humanity with us and choose how we want to experience that world.” Tell Then Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
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