Looks like Microsoft’s woes are growing by the day, after a near-successful launch of Bing, which gained over 10% of the market share in a short time, it has now been quietly sued ^[1] by Bing! Information Design LLC, which is a small design company based in St Louis, Mo, USA.

Bing LLC ^[2] has been running since 2000, and has a pending trademark application filed. On the other hand, Microsoft came out with Bing, the decision search engine, in May 2009, and has heavily advertised it on television and web mediums. According to a Microsoft Spokesperson:

We believe this suit to be without merit and we do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace with regard to the complainant’s offerings and Microsoft’s Bing.

However, this is a long shot for Bing LLC to get any reprieve from court, since companies in different verticals are allowed to have the same trademarks, as long as they are not competing with each other in one way or the other. So all aside, this might be a dampener and nothing much will come out of it.

Me wonders, why Bing LLC did not book Bing.com in the first place? That would certainly have meant that Microsoft would have used a different name. If this case does go through and Bing LLC wins, what do you think would be the appropriate name for the search engine, Moogle? Ming? Microing? :-). Let me know through your comments.