I recently left a job working for a large corporation that has its hands in everything (think Sony, Microsoft, etc). The non-compete in that case makes no sense

I recently left a job working for a large corporation that has its hands in everything (think Sony, Microsoft, etc). The non-compete in that case makes no sense - I was involved in, naturally, a very small corner of the company, but I was barred from touching anything that my former employer engaged in. So, even if I was working on word processing apps, the fact that the company has a hand in cloud computing makes me unable to take a job that field also. As corporations get larger, these issues will become more prevalent.