Can Blaise Agüera y Arcas End Google Maps' Arms Race With Apple And Microsoft?

Google just poached high-profile engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas from Microsoft. Here's what he could bring to Mountain View.

Two weeks ago, when I asked Blaise Agüera y Arcas, one of Microsoft's most prominent engineers, for his thoughts on the company's fierce rivalry with Google and Apple in the digital maps space, he was careful not to disparage his competitors too much--even when discussing Apple's much-publicized flop when it entered the maps market. "I don't have schadenfreude about these things," he said. "I believe in competition--it's a race to some degree. It's not a large set of companies that have the scale to have a serious go at this, but it's a set of more than one."

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