Kayak Threatens MSFT's Bing With Legal Action

Didn't even know what Kayak was, but they seem to look identical except bing is prettier.

They do look similar, but I never heard of kayak. I bet their just upset that Microsoft chose the better name.

A number of the ticket buy sites have similar pages ... so what? If your getting better prices, you'll follow the money not the name at the top.

Kayak needs to beat the bat snot of of Bing in the Marketplace instead of trying to use the courtrooms.

Well now you do. I've been using Kayak for years - really good site to find air/hotel deals. Every product Microsoft is coming out with lately is copy of some other product out there.. that's fine.. but what happened to coming up with your own breakthrough idea once in a while. It needed Google to kick it's butt before it created Live/Bing. iPod -> Zune. PS -> XBOX. Pretty much every product Google created - MS has a copy of it. Google came out with PowerMeter.. MS follows with Hohm. PS: I love Windows 7.

who cares. Tough luck kayak.

free advertising, you can argue that any online computer store with a search and a listing function by categories like CPU or GPU is considering infringing on newegg's design or something. The internet is big, and copying the right methods always happen.

Oh no! Microsoft made a page with frames and results listings. Only Kayak has done that before! /sarcasm

There are more than a million sites that use that exact same layout, but because M$ did it, and the service is similar to another site, they must be sued! Take a look at search results pages for any of the major search engines. They all look literally identical--results listings on the left, sponsored sites on the right.

Quoted from the government copyright website: "Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation..."

Kayak is just trying to gain publicity for their site; they have no case.

Did someone patent the Top-side Search bar, Left-side Options Menu, and Right-side Results Screen? If so... millions of sites will owe money! I can see similarities, but really, Microsoft is just using what works... and so is apparently Kayak.

I love it when people say Company X only copied someone Else's crap. Well duh! ALL companies do this, especially large plodding companies. Why do you think Cisco, Oracle, IBM, GOOGLE, Microsoft, all buy up small companies all the time. For the freaks that keep saying well, Apple is a real innovator ... whatever kool aid drinker. Apple took someone Else's idea and sold/produced it better too. Besides ... first to market rarely wins the race. Plenty of companies had MP3 players to market before Apple ... how did that workout for them???

I'd wager this is why they're even toying the idea of a lawsuit against Microsoft. They win, they get financial compensation and they get their free advertising. They lose, they still get advertising.

Looks a lot like travelocity or expedia, which look preety similar to eachother too. For that matter it looks a lot like the sonystyle online store.

There are only so many damned ways to display a table of information.

Eh, Microsoft could've at least changed the color scheme to make it less obvious.

More Microsoft Research and Development at it's best.

MS had a search engine before google.

MS had office suites before google.

MS had a mobile OS before google.

MS had a picture album before google.

MS has had a lot of things before google.

I think the real question is why is Google stealing ideas from Microsoft?

As far as the looks between the two and frankly if you took pretty much any travel site and you will see quite a bit of similarity between all of them.

I actually work in the same office as kayak and Im going to go wander around and see what the employees think

Good question fan-of-ms, since ms have everything first. Than my question to you is, why ms release zune after the ipod?

That is not the point of my listing, oh one who lacks basic comprehension.

He says MS steals everything from Google. I listed things that MS has done before Google.

I did not say MS is this mass originator of everything. I did not make some sort of case that MS is the originator of any of those things listed. I was showing the fallacy of his argument.

Now go back to English class, please.

Seriously! And just for the record:

You're and your have different meanings.

They're, there and their have different meanings too.

Oops, I forgot one:

Than and then have very different meanings.

Apple stole the mouse and GUI, then tried to sue MS for developing a GUI that could interact with a mouse. Xerox originally created BOTH . Sony stole the idea for a gaming console from Sega, as did Nintendo and MS. Sega also produced the first coin operated arcade machine...which Nintendo also stole, as did Atari. The tech industry is nothing but 1 company stealing an idea from another company. That's how it is, and has always been. Hell, Apple stole the idea to create a computer from IBM. If it wasn't for companies stealing ideas from each other....IBM would have been the only company producing computers until charged as a monopoly and broken up like AT&T/Bell Labs was.

Theres only so many ways to organize a flight ticket site lol...a few sites look exactly like both of these

Kayak?? who is that? from what I can tell, Kayak is stealing code very much from expedia.com and hotel.com because it look so familiar.
Come on, it's flights, it's all the same info.....
pretty much a remake of the CRT page your travel agents use to use to book your flight.
there is no legal rights to layout of websites.

author..please also post site page of expedia.com and hotel.com
and travelocity.com....
I used them all and they all look super similair.(even same prices)

A gui interface on the left and the prices and info on the right wow else would have thought of that for a shopping lay out =p. I'm pretty sure that's how all shopping/search websites work with minor structural differences between them. Imo bing's interface looks cleaner.

Taking something else, making it better, and claming it was all their own.
That's just what Microsoft does.

They made a better looking layout that's very similar, and they claim it as their own.

Nothing new here, move along.

only content can be copyrighted (data that can be printed), not ideas, methods, or systems - what kayak should have done is tried to patent their 'system'. Systems cannot be copyrighted. This is a patent case, not copyright. If they have no patent, they are DOA.

While I don't like Microsoft, they did buy Farecast, which did have a similar layout to Kayak, and I guess, still do.

I haven't seen this view posted, but alot of these travel sites and other kind of sites as well, are owned by the same company that gets a few domain names and basically scatters them on the web, all doing close to the same thing. So that causes alot of different websites to look the same because they are from the same company who designed them all.

I thought of this because there are alot of websites that look the same and I wondered why there hasn't been a huge sue fest until now when Kayak decided to sue MS. I guess either alot of the sites that look similar are owned by the same company or they figure the other sites are too small to sue, but when it comes to MS, they are a gold mine to be taken by law suit.

I have used Kayak just recently through Asia.com, a site that scans all the sites like Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity, Cheaptickets, etc and you'd be surprised how many of those sites from the search results at Asia.com look the same.

How stupid, as mentioned you can't copyright a general look and feel. Wow - how many sites have top nav bar and left nav bar with light shaded grey? Give me a break. MS is such a target of gold-diggers. I hope they counter-sue and make Kayak spend a lot of $$ just on court costs...MS shoudln't even care if they lose or not, lol.