It's still wrong. If Google's offering is better than Amazon's for some customers, why can't the sales guy who used to work for Amazon tell the customers they should get Google's offering? Customer wins.
High level corporate sales is basically buying a suave guy who has a rolodex of people who can make purchasing decisions.
It is a huge problem if that guy can then turn around and use the contacts he gained through Amazon to compete with Amazon. He is basically turning Amazon's network of contacts into his own and then selling that access to a competitor. It is basically the sales/bizdev equivalent of taking Amazon code and handing it over to Google for a price. Amazon shouldn't have to pay money to negate that risk.
Technically, even in California, if he did something like that it would hold under any reasonable non-solicitation agreement I believe. It is the exact reason these agreements exist.
I'm not 100% sure that is what happened but it sounds like it.
> "High level corporate sales is basically buying a suave guy who has a rolodex of people who can make purchasing decisions."
If you're buying a guy with a rolodex, do you really own his rolodex or are you renting the use of it?
If said rolodex was created on Amazon's watch, with Amazon resources, you can make a pretty decent claim to ownership, but if those contacts pre-dated Amazon, then (not legally speaking, morally) can Amazon really lay ownership on it?
> If you're buying a guy with a rolodex, do you really own his rolodex or are you renting the use of it?
Both. His job is to convert contacts into customers. If contacts become customers, his obligation is not to re-sell the same customers to the next company.
> If said rolodex was created on Amazon's watch, with Amazon resources, you can make a pretty decent claim to ownership, but if those contacts pre-dated Amazon, then (not legally speaking, morally) can Amazon really lay ownership on it?
Key bit from the article was:
“Szabadi was involved in developing, implementing and managing Amazon Web Services’ strategy for many of its partners, and was the first point of contact for most partners who were considering working with Amazon.”
I'd say, morally, its quite reasonable to say "No, you can't solicit business from our customers for X months." Amazon is just playing it cautious and being negotiated down to that position.
It is like anything else in terms of legalities. Sometimes people get overzealous and go too far.
Turn it around. How would you feel if you solicited business from Customer X, hired another consultant to perform 50% of the work, then they turned around and stole Customer X from you because of the contacts/access they gained from when you hired them?
The person buying the cloud offerings is not the only customer. Amazon is also a customer, and in their compensation agreement with the vendor (the ex-employee), the ex-employee agreed (presumably) not to work for someone else for some period of time.
Whether or not that should be legal is a different matter. Sometimes if all employers are doing it, it can result in an unfair and unhealthy environment for employees, however, sometimes if all employees can switch jobs willy nilly and take clients with them (especially those with strong relationships with clients), then it can become an unhealthy environment for employers.
If you don't want your clients to switch just because one of your employees switches, don't design your systems to be so reliant on the actions of an individual employee, and don't make your offerings so weak compared to the competition that your clients are willing to switch.
Win by providing better products. Anything else shouldn't be encouraged by the legal system.
...anything else wasn't encouraged by the legal system. The 2 parties (Amazon and employee) entered into a voluntary and disclosed contractual agreement.
Also, sometimes it's not feasible/possible to design a system where clients aren't so reliant on individual employees. For example, in the legal and finance professions, certain key people have so much knowledge regarding certain deals / events, that you can't just swap them out. It is a major investment on the part of a company to train and get someone up to speed on a piece of business, and one way to mitigate the risk of them leaving is to have them sign a voluntary agreement to not compete for x amount of time.
Obviously, this can be abused in situations where employers have the upper hand. But in many high powered positions where highly qualified people have a lot of leverage against their employer, it could help reduce costs a lot (for the end consumer also, since the risk of someone leaving and taking the business would just raise the prices you have to charge to mitigate that risk, as opposed to a non compete).
In places like (e.g.) the financial sector, they have compensation for the duration of the non-compete. Many tech sector employers have no such concession. They basically want you to just 'not work' in the tech sector for the duration of the non-compete, which is completely not fair to the worker.
Yes, but consider this: you have a government-protected monopoly on your home when you own it. Imagine if anyone could compete for your home simply by occupying it. That would be economically ruinous.
Intellectual property is also a government-protected monopoly, created for the advancement of society.
Basically I'm saying that monopoly can be good or bad depending on the specifics. So competition can be very destructive in some cases.
Am I missing something?