Microsoft and Apple experience “employees exodus” as they move towards Meta for joining its Metaverse plans
Since the time Facebook has launched its plans for Metaverse by renaming the social networking giant as ‘Meta’, it is constantly hiring employees from Microsoft and Apple who are eager to jump ship for joining the Meta Platforms owing to its soaring plans for the metaverse.
As per some of the former employees of Microsoft who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, about 100 people have ditched the firm’s augmented reality team in the last one year for joining Meta Platforms, the employees claim that Meta has been specifically focused on snapping up people who had been working on Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality (AR) headsets.
According to the WSJ report, Linkedin profiles represent a figure more than 70 who were formerly with the Microsoft’s HoloLens team but have left the project over the last year, as 40 people from among them take on new positions at Meta.
What is most significant for Meta hiring Microsoft’s employees is the first-mover advantage in the AR space that they have, thus making them valuable assets to Meta.
Microsoft had announced its HoloLens project about five years back in 2016, with the technology transforming into one of the most advanced headsets presently.
Similarly, Apple is witnessing what can be called an “employee exodus” to Meta, which it is trying to counter by offering lucrative stock options as well as bonuses worth between $50,000 and $180,000. This was reported by Bloomberg recently.
In late December 2021, Apple had reportedly offered bonuses to a bunch of engineers in hardware, silicon design, and some software operations workers.
Meta Platforms was Facebook until it planned a major rebranding exercise in October 2021, hence signalling the company’s ambitions of growing beyond social media. Its virtual reality hardware business, dubbed as “Reality Labs”, has been dedicatedly working in the months since, to successfully create a prototype of its virtual reality “haptic gloves” in mid-November 2021.
Despite the early successes, the centralized Meta’s attempts of dominating the
Metaverse has led to major criticism in the wider community, across industry leaders in the NFT, blockchain, cryptocurrencies and GameFi spaces.
Some crypto leaders like Hodl Asset’s Jenny Ta have indicated that Mark Zuckerberg should not be the one leading Facebook into the Metaverse at all, considering his history regarding privacy, data mining and content policies.
She had said in an interview with Cointelegraph back in November 2021 that in order for him to create a clean slate for Meta, Zuckerberg “must step down” and have another CEO run it.
Both tech giants Microsoft and Apple have had their sights on the Metaverse for quite a long time. In early November 2021, Microsoft had announced a slew of teams updates and upgrades to its Xbox gaming console, along side a new product called “Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that the Metaverse has enabled us to embed computing into the real world and vice versa.
Nadella added that what is more important is that we are now able to bring humanity along while choosing how we want to experience the world.
