
Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us - johns
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/kayak-bing/
======
tokenadult
Help me understand: is it a terrible problem to design one website so that it
looks similar to another website, but not a terrible problem to reproduce a
copyrighted musical recording and share it with your friends? I'm trying to
figure out what the general principle of fairness (or morality) is here.

~~~
enomar
The culture isn't (completely) homogeneous here. The people saying it's bad to
rip off web sites aren't necessarily the same people saying it's ok copy mp3s.

I would imagine that many people believe that the morality of stealing depends
on who you're stealing from. Additionally, many probably don't consider it
theft if there isn't an immediately apparent victim.

~~~
baddox
"Who you're stealing from" is a bad argument for (or against) piracy. The only
sound (pun intended) argument for piracy that I know of is the fact that
intellectual property laws are fundamentally a bunch of crap.

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trickjarrett
We had a discussion about this weeks ago, pointing out that Microsoft bought
Farecast who had similar site design. But it's interesting to see it just now
burbling up to the top elsewhere.

I love HN, I learn / find more sooner than through so many other outlets.

~~~
lpgauth
As much as I like to bash M$, this time M$ is not to blame... If anyone it's
Farecast...

~~~
brown9-2
If Microsoft owns Farecast, they are in fact ultimately responsible. That's
what ownership means.

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timdorr
Just an interesting note:

Kayak was founded in 2004. FareCast was founded in 2003.

I don't know when either site launched or iterated to their current base
design, but even before Microsoft bought FareCast, it looked exactly like
Kayak. I actually thought they were powered by the same company. It looked
like this in the past:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/f/f2/200906...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/f/f2/20090601104302!Live_Search_Farecast.png)
That was still pretty close (although it's more obvious now).

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pxlpshr
Sometimes there's only so many ways to skin a cat, art is very much an
influential process and converging ideas are common. I can dig up PRINT and
INTERACTIVE magazines from the 90-00's and show you plenty of designs that
have been "copied" a million times over.

[http://images.colinanawaty.com/screenshots/5b629b77aa8a247c3...](http://images.colinanawaty.com/screenshots/5b629b77aa8a247c38312284b0251ecc.png)

If Kayak thinks their design is so original, maybe they should check out
eBay's two column layout; filters on the left, content in the middle. Unless
MS copied code and a VERYYYY unique approach to UI, this is a weak case that
should be thrown out, IMO. Notice too that the screenshot in the WIRED article
uses the EXACT same search data so it's even more suggestive that Microsoft
copied Kayak. Controversy brings eye balls...

~~~
chriseppstein
Even if kayak loses the court battle, the amount of free PR they get from
suing far outweighs the cost of the lawyers.

~~~
vorador
I think that bing will get even more free PR

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jf
I really like Kayak and the team that runs that company, I've had several
interactions with them, all of them positive. And I wish them the best in
resolving this.

(One of these interactions was suggesting that they they make CNAME so that
the URL "moc.kayak.com" would resolve, so they did.)

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ojbyrne
In my opinion, kayak is in trouble. They're grossly overcapitalized (~ $200
million in investments) and are watching their product being commoditized.
Resorting to lawyers is a classic reaction to that problem.

~~~
jbm
200 mil?

It's funny because I built an effective copy of the site a while back.

Maybe I should put up instructions and open source it.

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mattmaroon
One significantly better feature about Bing is that it doesn't have any
"compare to x in another window" boxes checked by default. I switched from
Kayak to Mobissimo because of that (despite the fact that their name is so
annoyingly hard to remember that I kept inadvertantly going back to Kayak) and
unfortunately Mobissimo eventually checked some boxes by default too. So now
I'll use Bing.

~~~
ojbyrne
That's because there is significant income in the popups generated by those
checkboxes. But hopefully bing is leading the way in making them disappear.

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coderdude
I feel for Kayak. I used to get so angry when I'd catch a competitor blatantly
ripping us off. Once I had to call a company's CEO and bitch at him about it
(to which he completely denied any similarity between our sites and continues
to ride our coattails). In the end, you just learn to deal with it because if
you're better you'll usually stay on top regardless of how much of your talent
they attempt to siphon. That's also why I stopped having a heart attack every
time I'd post a blog entry just to have it slurped up by a dozen spam sites.

Though in this case, if Microsoft (or whoever down the chain is developing
this site) were blatantly ripping off my design I’d PISSED OFF TO NO END. They
have way more money for marketing. ;)

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kragen
"Stop copying me" belongs back in elementary school, along with "I'm rubber
and you're glue" and "Nanny-nanny boo-boo."

Fortunately US judges seem to have graduated from elementary school, and they
have pretty much smacked down look-and-feel lawsuits every time they've come
up: Apple versus Microsoft, Lotus versus Borland, etc.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
You do realize that's a headline right?

~~~
kragen
Yes, but I read the article too, and it seems like an adequate
characterization of the C&D and the conflict, as far as the article describes
it.

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nopassrecover
Heh this site design is used by nearly every travel site and flights company,
I doubt Kayak have much of a claim to it.

~~~
KWD
And just about every product company. Newegg is not far off. Left column to
modify your selection, right column to list products.

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prpon
Kayak can cry foul all they want but there is nothing stopping MS or anyone
else from copying the site design.

It is a shame that MS could not come up with anything more usable, original
and innovative.

(I am avoiding blanket statements such as 'they haven't done anything
innovative since xx)

~~~
coderdude
You're right, nothing is stopping them. But people that rip off layouts are
extremely lame and I'm glad that Kayak is complaining about it. Why is such a
big company making these amateur moves?

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Confusion
Given the available research on consumer behaviour and given the available
data on website popularity, isn't it to be expected that websites in a certain
segement will start to resemble each other more and more, as they converge
towards an optimally consumerfriendly design?

As the recent Coldplay - Cat Stevens - Joe Satriani love triangle shows: it
isn't just website design. By now, the amount of output in any kind of
creative activity is so large that there is inevitable overlap. When the
output is filtered by the selection criterion of 'what the average human (in
Western civilization) likes', chances of similar designs surviving becomes
even larger. It would be more surprising if this _didn't_ happen.

This is interesting for entrepeneurs, in that you shouldn't be discouraged by
ideas and 'designs' similar to yours popping up everywhere. It's inevitable
and it's the details in the execution (or the fact that you are executing it
at all) that matters.

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dinkumthinkum
It does look like somebody at Microsoft fired up Firefox/Firebug and had a
copy-and-paste party.

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trezor
The fact that someone is complaining over a service Microsoft is offering
rather than ignoring it shows that they have indeed done something well with
bing.

Now if they would only expand on their localization efforts so I could
actually take advantage of this.

