Sounds to me like they're trying to take a bigger bite out of the search market.......but lack of end-user use/acceptance has left them a wee bit rabid to find some more meaty names....

I'm no lawyer, but wouldn't this Dascar guy have to be operating a search engine under the Kumo name for his trademark to mean anything?

So what? This is MS. You think something as trivial as that would stop 'em? They'd probably just use it anyway and then bury the poor guy under a mountain of lawyers if he tried to complain about it.

Besides - does anyone actually use the Microsoft search engine? Kumo, my behind... actually scrub that - it sounds dirty.

Yeah, they'll probably try to bury the guy under a mountain of lawyers.

Their search engine is still going to be utterly shit and used only by people with very low IQs or very little web experience.

They'd be better off wasting their time and money on making sure that the next OS they release works better than 98se2 or XP...

The strength of the trademark is only as good as the owners ability to enforce it and prevent it from wrongfully being used within the registered domain. At the end of the day it comes down to the depth of pockets of the parties concerned. The guy would appear to be a troll, looking for a big pay off from M$.

Also, as soon as the trademark passes into general language use (as a generic verb or noun) then it ceases to be much of a trademark. Google is probably getting close to this, which they are probably not too worried about until we start using some other search engine to do our googling with.

I'm just off to kumo the interweb, for some new pocket protectors.

Mine's the one with the slogan "My other Hoover's a Dyson" on the back.

..a large slobbery dog that also killed people in a horror fim?