Microsoft Threatened a Teenager Named Mike Rowe
Microsoft generated $49.36 billion in revenue for the three months that ended on March 31, 2022. Financially, the company is doing pretty well. Perhaps they are so successful because they are almost absurdly inexpensive in their commercial dealings, as seen by their threatened legal action against a Canadian adolescent.
Mike Rowe, at seventeen, established a website with the domain name MikeRoweSoft.com as a joke based on his own name. Jokes are not popular at Microsoft. They threatened the adolescent with legal proceedings at the beginning of 2004. They asked him to give the domain to them in exchange for a $10 payment. That's one zero, or the cost he paid at the time to register the domain name.
With the excuse that he was just starting his own graphic design company and had invested a lot of effort in the website he was using, Rowe countered with a $10,000 offer. Microsoft's legal team responded with a 25-page letter that included a number of demands, including an admission of guilt and an accusation of cyber squatting.
The incident attracted a lot of media attention and gave Microsoft a bad reputation. Microsoft pushed back and charged that he was prolonging the situation to get paid more. Mike ended up handing up the domain, but not for $10 or $10,000; they later apologized, claiming they "took it too seriously." He received an Xbox.
