LinkedIn profiles have a lot to say …
According to previous employees, only about 100 people have already switched to Meta from Microsoft alone. Meanwhile, Apple is offering generous bonuses to keep its employees.
According to former Microsoft employees quoted by the Wall Street Journal, about 100 people have left the technology giant’s augmented reality team there in the past year to join Meta Platforms. They said Meta was particularly focused on hiring people who worked on Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality (AR) headphones.
According to the WSJ, Linkedin profiles show that more than 70 people who have been part of the Microsoft HoloLens team have left the project in the past year, and more than 40 of them have taken up new positions at Meta.
As Microsoft was the first to enter the AR space, its staff became valuable to Meta. More than five years ago, in 2016, Microsoft announced its HoloLens project, a technology that has evolved into one of the most advanced headsets 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 bonuses to an engineering team dedicated to silicon design, hardware and some software operations.
Meta Platforms was formerly known as Facebook until the large-scale renaming campaign in October 2021, when the company signaled its growing ambitions beyond social media. Its virtual reality hardware business, Reality Labs, has worked hard in the months since then, and in mid-November 2021 successfully completed a prototype of a virtual reality “haptic glove”.
Despite these early successes, centralized Meta’s attempts to dominate the metaverse have elicited considerable criticism in the wider community, which includes leaders in the cryptographic, NFT, blockchain, and GameFi areas.
Microsoft and Apple have been eyeing the metaverse for a long time. In early November 2021, Microsoft announced a series of Teams updates and an Xbox game console update in this direction, as well as a new product called Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces.
“The metaverse allows us to embed computing into the real world 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 this world.” He told then Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
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