Agreed that he shouldn't be kept from using his experience, or knowledge - but the question is, should he be allowed to transition all of the customers that he acquired (or perhaps even inherited) while at Amazon over to Google?
If they want that? Yes. Why not? Does Amazon have some kind of "we got them as customer once, now we own them" privilege?
Non-competes always sounded to me like an incentive for companies to behave bad. "Well, Bill cannot work somewhere else as long as we compete, so we don't have to treat him well. And the customers he brought in won't be going anywhere else for the time being, so we don't have to treat them well either. Perfect."
If your product is so comparable that customers will move to a competitor because their salesman moved, does the public have any interest in having the government act as protection-money collector?
And if Google has any ethics (which it does, and presumably he does too) he won't transition any of those customers. The list of customers would be considered proprietary information. But his experience in dealing with customers, in general, is presumably how he stays employed.
If it's anything like e.g. financial planners (and I'm not sure that it is, but I have some familiarity with similar situations in that field), when he moves to a new firm he isn't allowed to inform any of his former clients, and the old firm won't tell them where he went, but any clients who figure it out and can procure his new contact info are welcome to transfer their custom to the new firm.
If you have clients that are willing to switch firms to stay with a particular person, is that person not just as much part of the product as the financial instruments hes selling? If my doctor switches practices, but he knows my medical history, is the doctor not as much part of the service as the medicine itself? Would it be appropriate for a practice to keep that doctor from working as a doctor somewhere else because of competition?
You have to balance that with the fact that the doctor has the right to stay employed. If contents of the doctor's brain (including the medical history of his patients) are so critical that the practice would lose customers if the doctor left, then instead of pursuing legal action against the doctor if he leaves, the practice should ensure he is compensated enough that he has little incentive to leave.
Well in fact financial planning is in large part a snow-job. (The parts that aren't "invest in index funds", that is.) So the greatest actual skill is customer relations, which is an inherently personal thing. It's not clear that IaaS is equivalent, but maybe that's what Amazon are implying with this lawsuit.
