Microsoft sues Google

By Steve Malone

Posted on 20 Jul 2005 at 10:45

Microsoft is suing search rival Google following the defection of one of its key employees. Kai-Fu Lee, former corporate VP of Microsoft's Natural Interactive Services Division, has accepted a position with Google to head up its new China research and development centre.

Dr. Lee, is well known in the industry for his work in the areas of speech recognition and artificial intelligence. Before Microsoft, Dr. Lee was a VP and general manager at Silicon Graphics, responsible for Internet and multimedia software. He also spent six years at Apple, as vice president of the company's interactive media group.

As a senior member of the Microsoft management, Dr Lee not only knows a great deal about Microsoft's search strategy but also it business plans regarding the People's Republic of China. The lawsuit alleges that by accepting a position with a direct competitor Dr Lee can apply insider knowledge about Microsoft's trade secrets, intellectual property and strategies.

Microsoft is therefore asking the court to order Dr. Lee and Google to honour the confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed when he began working for Microsoft.

The latest move is also part of a continuing battle between the big software companies to hire the best staff. Over the past six months Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google have been hiring senior engineers from academia, the Mozilla open source project and each other.

As projects become larger, the search for talent becomes ever more acute. This week at the Microsoft Faculty Summit, Bill Gates said he was 'very worried' about the lack of talented computer science graduates. He noted that ' Microsoft is trying to hire every great college graduate who has basic computer science skills and we think is highly talented. When I sit down and review projects here inside the company, the topic that always comes up is how is the hiring going?' This is a situation likely to be happening in large software companies across the world.