Microsoft nabs former Yahoo chief scientist to work on big data integration
Summary: Microsoft has added to its technical fellow ranks a former Yahoo chief scientist to help Redmond's big data push. — Microsoft has added a new technical fellow to the ranks who will focus on big-data integration.
Context & Ripple Effects
This hire lands four months after Microsoft dropped its homegrown Dryad project and put its big-data bets on Hadoop, leaving the company needing exactly the kind of integration expertise a chief-scientist-grade hire brings to the technical fellow ranks. The pickup also extends a pattern: former Yahoo tech star Eric Boyd made the same jump to Redmond back in 2009 (reported at the time by BoomTown)
First-order effects
- Microsoft's Hadoop-centric big-data effort gains a senior integration architect inside the technical fellow program, giving the strategy it adopted when it abandoned Dryad an identifiable technical owner.
- Yahoo loses one more senior researcher days after confirmed mid-March 2012 layoffs hit its top engineering and technology staff, deepening the perception of a research organization in retreat.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo's continued outflow of research leadership makes it harder for the company to hold the remaining scientists who anchor its reputation, while rivals gain both the talent and the signal that Yahoo's bench is available.
- The wide syndication of this hire — GigaOM, AllThingsD, GeekWire, The Seattle Times among others — turns a single personnel move into a competitive marker, pressuring other big-data platform vendors to make counter-hires or announce their own research commitments.
Third-order effects
- If the flow of web-era research talent toward Hadoop-aligned platform incumbents holds, big-data expertise consolidates around a handful of large vendors rather than the search companies that produced it, reshaping where enterprise data-stack innovation is expected to come from.
The trend: The 2012 big-data arms race is pulling research talent out of first-generation web pioneers like Yahoo and into Hadoop-standardizing platform incumbents like Microsoft.