Why Everyone is Mad at Google - Google Poaches Talent
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Any large successful company is going to attract the best and brightest brains. When that company looks as if it is riding the wave of the future, it's going to have more applicants than it knows what to do with. Add to that the kind of working conditions and work environment that is the envy of Silicon Valley, and even recruiting well-established talent with strong positions at prestigious companies becomes rather like shooting fish in a barrel.
Hardcore eBayers may know that the online auctioneer recently went live with eBay Express, a website at which users can purchase goods for fixed prices. What they might not know is that eBay needed to create a new search technology, codenamed Magellan, in order to make the site work. Louis Monier, the engineer who developed that technology at eBay, left to join Google last year.
It's sometimes easy to forget that Amazon also has its own search engine, A9. It's for searching the web as well as searching Amazon's website. A9 has its own CEO. Until earlier this year, that person was Udi Manber. He left, and is also working for Google now.
Of course, the most prominent example of "brain drain" is Kai-fu Lee. This former Microsoft vice president worked on the software giant's expansion into China and certain natural language projects at the company. He now works for Google, but Microsoft didn't let him go without a fight. It slapped the search engine with an acrimonious lawsuit over the non-disclosure agreement Lee signed while working at Microsoft, which sought to limit the damage caused by Lee "going over to the enemy." Even now, it's interesting to note that (at the time of this writing) the top result for "Kai-fu Lee" in Google is Microsoft's bio page for him, which notes that he left the software giant in July of 2005.
What was perhaps most insulting for Microsoft is that Lee was not the first high-level "brain" it lost to Google, and probably won't be the last. Indeed, this must be a pretty major adjustment for Microsoft, which has long been used to being "the" company to work for. I rather doubt it's happy about yielding that distinction to Google.
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