Home Facebook Snags the Guy Who Built Google’s Chrome OS

Facebook Snags the Guy Who Built Google’s Chrome OS

The battle between Facebook and Google just got even hotter with the news that the social network has hired Matthew Papakipos, the man who started and lead both the Google Chrome OS project and the Chrome WebGL GPU hardware project for hardware-accelerated graphics. Both projects “are in good shape,” Papakipos said in a Tweet this morning, so he’s leaving to join the project team at Facebook.

If the Chrome Operating System is going to be a major part of Google’s plans for the future, and its strategy for staving off Facebook’s potential domination of the internet experience for a billion people, then this hire is likely bad news for Google. Facebook, on the other hand, is putting together quite the team.

Along with the hire of Papakipos, Facebook also announced today that it has hired Jocelyn Goldfein, a former VP and GM of virtualization giant VMware’s desktop business unit. A few press outlets, including us, were just sent a small email from Facebook HQ about the hires minutes ago. Late last night Papakipos Tweeted, “I love that in this busy crazy over-connected world i can still keep a secret among friends.”

Assembling a Powerful Team

Put these two new people together with Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, brought to Facebook almost three years ago and Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, the creators of Gmail, Adsense and Friendfeed, acquired just under one year ago, and what do you get? A monster team with the experience to create a compelling, fully wrap-around internet experience for hundreds of millions of users.

Big, hot companies make big, hot hires and are generally deep in talent, but for Facebook to have nabbed the guy leading Chrome OS and the WebGL hardware acceleration program is a pretty big coup.

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