Yahoo Accused Of Raiding Workers 118
wellington map writes "Nuance Communications, a Menlo Park maker of speech-recognition software, has sued Yahoo for unfair competition and theft of trade secrets, accusing the Internet giant of raiding all but one of Nuance's research and development engineers. Nuance said 13 engineers from its Menlo Park and Montreal offices were 75 percent finished with a project that would allow people to search the Internet by speaking their queries into a telephone, rather than typing them on a computer keyboard. Nuance planned to sell the technology to companies like Yahoo."
Key Point: Nuance was being bought by Scansoft (Score:4, Informative)
For example: Last year Scansoft bought a company called Rhetorical. Rhetorical sold a speech synthesizer that was better and cost less than Scansoft's. Just one year later Rhetorical is a dead product. Scansoft has fired all but one Rhetorical employee and they are pushing Rhetorical customers to buy the less-capable Scansoft RealSpeak speech synthesizer for a higher price.
Thanks to this notorious reputation, the Nuance engineers knew they had at most one year of employment left after Scansoft takes over. Scansoft would probably pay them to finish the project - but they almost certainly would then get canned.
Would you stay in these circumstances? I wouldn't.
PS: Yahoo isn't the only one hiring speech research engineers left and right. Google has hired dozens of speech engineers from Nuance, Scansoft, and other companies in the last year. Remember the guy in China Google hired that Microsoft got all pissy and sued Google about? Guess what he and many of his Chinese co-workers were hired to do at Microsoft originally: Speech research.
Relationship Nuance and the people who quit (Score:2, Informative)
Regards, Tommy
I wouldn't want to work for ScanSoft either. (Score:2, Informative)
I applaud those Nuance engineers for getting out. Yahoo is probably a much more exciting place to work, because Nuance has been a sinking ship, financial speaking, for quite some time.