It really bothers me when stories like this make the news. There is no story, the article is void. And to think it reached Hacker New's front page!
I don't know Blaise or have any direct experience with him, however when I worked at Microsoft I used to enjoy his talks and demos at company events. That doesn't sound like much but that was pretty rare.<p>At the same time my cynical side would figure that if he's half as competent as he seemed to be in these appearances, he's probably unhappy at Microsoft.
Looks like he was involved in Photosynth - which just got an update. <a href="http://photosynth.net/preview" rel="nofollow">http://photosynth.net/preview</a>
The other story should be that we won't really get to play with the Photosynth tech (mentioned in the story) until <a href="https://www.google.com.au/patents/US20130100128" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com.au/patents/US20130100128</a> expires.
He's not the first Microsoft employee to go to Google, and won't be the last. Maybe if this was Steve Ballmer, it would be newsworthy, but other than that, no...