I think it's less the fact that the individual has worked for Salesforce for 9 years, rather that the winning app was not developed for the hackathon. Heck, the product was even shown at a Meetup on Oct 8, weeks before the hackathon was announced.

Edit: just to add another layer to my response -- I had formed a team for the hackathon, but ended up not flying to SF for the hackathon (so I'm definitely not bitter about money/time spent, although we did meet several times to come up with ideas, etc.). One of the things we feared most was that some company will indeed present a polished product it had worked on for the past year, but never launched it. It's always a concern in any hackathon, and we figured it would be even a bigger one at a hackathon with a grand prize that big. HOWEVER, what's infuriating about the Salesforce hackathon is that the winning team had actually presented their product prior to the announcement of the hackathon! To me, it's very clear cut and enforceable. Although I'm not a lawyer, I think it's similar to a patent: if you are making your invention/app public, it's already in the public domain and shouldn't be given protection/eligibility to compete.