Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a top engineer with Microsoft is leaving the company to join Google.
Aguera y Arcas, was one of the key software architects with Microsoft who contributed to developing and building the company's Bing Maps service and its image-stitching Photosynth software.
The New York Times cites sources familiar with Google's plans and said Aguera y Arcas will now work on machine learning at Google, which Microsoft is also researching extensively. The New York Times said Aguera y Arcas has confirmed his plans of joining Google.
"On one hand, of course this is tremendously exciting; Google is a company of grand ambitions and brilliant people. On the other hand it has been hard- very hard- to detach emotionally from Microsoft. The company's leadership has been consistently good to me over these past eight years, and it has been a time filled with creativity and growth and good friends. It's painful to leave behind so many wonderful ongoing projects, and even more so to leave behind such a great team," said Aguera y Arcas in a blog post.
Aguera y Arcas joined Microsoft in 2006 after the acquisition of Seadragon Software, a company founded by him in 2003.
It may seem very common for employees to leave a company and join another, but defection from Microsoft to Google or vice-versa increases the bitterness between the rivals. This is not the first time that Google has poached top Microsoft executives. In the past, Kai-Fu Lee, a Microsoft vice president also joined Google, which led to courtroom battles between the two technology giants.
Microsoft sued Lee and Google, saying that Lee was in violation of a one-year non-compete agreement that was part of his Microsoft contract. However, the lawsuit was settled in 2005 without disclosing the terms of the pact.
In 2004, Mark Lucovsky, a top engineer with Microsoft also joined Google. Lucovsky said in a statement that Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, threw a chair across the room when he found out about Lucovsky's departure to Google.
A Microsoft spokesman has confirmed that Aguera y Arcas is leaving the company and wished "him the best in his future endeavors."
