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Judge Clears the Way for Google's Microsoft Hire

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hr-managers-wildest-dreams dept.

MarkEst1973 was one of the first to write to tell us MSNBC is reporting that a Judge has cleared the way for Google to hire former Microsoft employee Kai-Fu Lee. The hire does come with several limitations and Lee was also found to have 'misled his former employer and taken advantage of confidential Microsoft information'. This comes as a follow up to the original story in which Microsoft sued Google in order to prevent the hire. Tom Burt was quoted as saying that "Dr. Lee is going to be the highest-paid HR manager ever."

2 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft wasn't completely unjustified. by everphilski · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe you didn't RTFA:

    At the same time, King County Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez found that former Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) vice president Kai-Fu Lee had misled his former employer and taken advantage of confidential Microsoft information when first working at Google.

    All's not good for Mr. Lee.

    -everphilski-

  2. bad joke by idlake · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A judge on Tuesday cleared the way for Google Inc. to hire a former Microsoft executive to head its Chinese research and development center so long as the employee does not recruit from Microsoft. [...] Lee can begin working for Google (Research) by setting up a research office in China and recruiting software engineers if he does not use confidential information gleaned while he worked at Microsoft, the judge found.

    I have worked at two places that got raided by Microsoft for employees. Just about every month, some other important employee disappeared to Microsoft, sometimes in groups of two or three, and then those people would call their buddies and the next month even more would disappear. It was horrible for morale and it was horrible for projects. And of course these people were working on the same things at Microsoft that they had been working on before.

    And historically, many of Microsoft's major products were created by hiring away key employees from competitors and then having them build exactly the same product for Microsoft that they had been building before.

    This lawsuit is a complete joke, coming from Microsoft. The judge should have told Microsoft to stuff it.