The Meta-Universe Talent Battle begins! Foreign media exposed that more than 40 Microsoft employees jumped ship to Meta

On July 22, 2021, local time, a sign outside the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, California, USA. People's Vision Infographic

Under the concept of "meta-universe", the competition for talents has intensified.

According to the Wall Street Journal reported on January 10, local time, Microsoft's AR (augmented reality) team lost more than 100 employees, of which more than 40 people jumped to Meta Platforms.

According to former Microsoft employees, competitors have been scrambling for people with experience developing Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality headsets, sometimes even offering double salaries. Microsoft's AR team has about 1500 employees.

Microsoft HoloLens team members flow to Meta

Over the past year, more than 70 former HoloLens team members have LinkedIn data showing they left Microsoft, more than 40 of whom joined Meta, according to the Wall Street Journal. The departing employees included some of the team's long-term leaders. For example, Charlie Han, who was responsible for gathering customer feedback for HoloLens, left last summer to join Meta. Josh Miller, who works on the show team, has become Meta's show director in recent months.

As competitors benefit from a year-long brain drain, the future of Microsoft HoloLens becomes even more volatile.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has been at the forefront of innovation in metaversemic technology for years and "will continue to develop state-of-the-art hardware that makes it more immersive, less expensive, and has a variety of form factors." ”

Microsoft did not disclose details of the HoloLens team, but said employee turnover is a frequent challenge for many teams, and Microsoft is doing everything it can to retain employees and recruit new employees when needed.

Microsoft introduced the HoloLens augmented reality headset in 2015. Analysts estimate that Microsoft has shipped between 200,000 and 250,000 units. However, with only one hardware upgrade since 2015, there are few new features in the software part of the platform. At present, Microsoft still ranks among the top in augmented reality development, with more than 250,000 HoloLens headsets sold to enterprises for $3,500 each.

With a high price and lack of immersive experiences, Microsoft shifted the focus of HoloLens to the enterprise market. Previously, the U.S. military announced a contract with Microsoft, which indicated that Microsoft would customize a HoloLens-based military headset for the U.S. military IVAS headset project, and the contract value would be as high as $21.88 billion.

According to former Microsoft employees, Microsoft is developing lighter, cheaper versions for consumers, but it's still years away from going public. Former employees also revealed that Microsoft did not hire enough engineers to cope with the pressure that the IVAS project put on the company's resources. That has led some employees to question Microsoft's commitment to developing the technology, making them more likely to accept offers from competitors, including Meta.

Meta and Microsoft metaversms are positioned differently

Unlike Microsoft, Meta focuses on the consumer market.

Previously, Meta announced plans to invest at least $10 billion this year in its VR/AR division, The Facebook Reality Labs. As a result of the aggressive investment, Meta is recruiting key AR team members from other companies, including Microsoft and Apple.

"We are at the beginning of the next chapter of the Internet, which is also the next chapter of our company." "We hope that within the next decade, metaversity will reach 1 billion people, carry hundreds of billions of dollars in digital business, and support the work of millions of creators and developers." ”

Zuckerberg has said: "The next platform and medium will be a more immersive and concrete Internet, where you will be immersed in the experience, not just as a bystander, which we call the metaverse." ”

In addition, he once said in an interview, "Virtual reality will be an important part of the metaverse and a key part of our investment." It will be accessible on our different computing platforms, such as VR, AR, PC mobile devices, and game consoles. ”

Since the acquisition of Oculus in 2014, Meta has mainly focused on hardware and applications, and its business direction has followed the social entertainment attributes.

Compared with Meta's metacosm, Microsoft has focused more on digital office. In Microsoft's view, the essence of the metaverse lies in building a digital world that is durable and stablely connected to the real world, and the metacosm will allow people, things, fields and other elements in the physical world to share experience with the digital world.

During ignite 2021, Microsoft's annual technology conference, Microsoft released two important features around the metacosm: Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces provides a new perspective to help managers gain insight into how people move and interact in spaces like retail stores, factory floors, and how they manage health and safety in a hybrid work environment; mesh for Microsoft Teams combines Microsoft Mesh's mixed reality capabilities allow people in different locations to join in collaboration through the productivity tool Teams, hold meetings, send messages, work on shared documents, and more, and share holographic experiences.