More Promising Metaverse! Microsoft And Apple Employees Choose To Join Meta

A number of Microsoft and Apple employees moved to Meta. (UANNews)

JAKARTA – In the midst of the metaverse boom promoted by Meta some time ago, a number of cryptocurrencies that focus on developing the virtual world skyrocketed. The great potential of the metaverse was also glimpsed by a number of Microsoft and Apple employees. They chose to switch to Meta rather than the previous company.

The move of Microsoft and Apple employees to Meta comes as Mark Zuckerberg's company focuses on designing a virtual world metaverse.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a former Microsoft employee said about 100 people have left Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality (AR) team over the past year. They decided to join the new company Meta which specifically has the intention of attracting people who work at Microsoft's HoloLens.

According to the WSJ, the Linkedin profile shows that more than 70 people who were part of Microsoft's HoloLens team have left the project over the past year, with more than 40 of them taking new positions in Meta.

Microsoft's first-mover advantage in the AR space makes its employees a valuable asset to Meta. Microsoft announced the HoloLens project more than five years ago in 2016, with the technology evolving into one of the most advanced AR headsets in the world.

Apple is trying to counter the exodus of employees to Meta by offering lucrative stock options and bonuses worth between $50,000 and $180,000, according to a Bloomberg report. In late December 2021, the company is offering bonuses to a group of engineers who design silicon, hardware, and some software operations workers.

Facebook announced its rebranding to Meta in October 2021, signaling the company's ambition to develop its own virtual world. One of its hardware businesses Reality Labs has been hard at work in the months since the announcement and succeeded in creating a prototype of its virtual reality “haptic glove” in November 2021.

Despite Meta's initial attempts to dominate the metaverse even further, criticism from a number of figures in the crypto industry has emerged including from Hodl Asset's Jenny Ta. He stated that Zuckerberg should not point Facebook to the Metaverse. Because the company led by Zuckerberg has a history of data leaks, privacy, and content policies.

“For him to have a clean foundation for Meta, he had to step down and he had to have a new CEO to run it,” Jenny Ta said in a November interview with Cointelegraph.

Both Microsoft and Apple have been eyeing the Metaverse for some time. In early November 2021, Microsoft announced many updates and improvements to Teams to its Xbox gaming console, along with a new product called “Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces.”

The Metaverse is here, and it's changing not only the way we see the world, but also how we participate in it – from the factory floor to the meeting rooms,” wrote Microsoft boss Satya Nadella in a Twitter post on November 2.

“Metaverse allows us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the time.

“The most important thing is that we are able to bring our humanity with us, and choose how we want to experience this world,” Nadella added.