There is a rumor that Apple is shedding former Siri Team members and has recently lost another one to General Electric. Darren Haas, a member of the original team who developed Siri, has reportedly left Apple to work at General Electric.
Haas joined Apple after it purchased Siri and worked on cloud services. According to the rumor, political infighting in the Apple offices between the Cloud Engineering team and the Siri team has created a tense atmosphere.
"Political infighting has engulfed Apple's engineering ranks after the company decided to extend the software platform built by Siri's team to Apple's other Internet services such as iCloud and iTunes," reported The Information, citing sources familiar with the matter.
This infighting is allegedly the result of teams within Apple struggling to develop new cloud infrastructure. Through this new program, Apple strives to bring all iCloud users in-house instead of leveraging cloud solution provided by other companies including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
Haas' rumored departure echoes a similar report from a few days ago that says another Siri member, Steve D'Aurora, former chief architect for cloud engineering at Apple, is also allegedly leaving Apple to join General Electric.
General Electric announced an industrial data analytic cloud service in 2015, which provides key features for commercial Internet of Things development. The Predix Cloud, is targeted at driving key efficiencies in industrial engineering through built-in data analytics, asset connectivity, interoperability and unified communication, and on-demand availability.
General Electric began migrating its operations to the Predix Cloud in the fourth quarter of 2015 and is aiming to launch the service for commercial clients sometime in the near future.
If the rumors about Haas and D'Aurora leaving Apple to join General Electric are true, it is most likely that they would be working for the Predix Cloud program where they could leverage their experience with Siri and Apple to offer additional capabilities to the new platform.
Other members of the original Siri team have gone on to launch a new version that seems more advanced and easy to use than Apple's digital assistant. Announced on May 4 by Siri founders, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, the Viv Artificial Intelligence bot processes complex and unstructured commands in a more natural way through interaction and integration with third party apps.
Both Haas' and D'Aurora's LinkedIn pages still list Apple as their current employer and these rumors have not been verified by Apple, General Electric, Haas, or D'Aurora.
Photo: Marco Paköeningrat | Flickr
