Re:If you don't want this to happen to you... (Score 1)

Don't make them an offer. It seems that the big catch here is that Mike made a $10,000 offer to Microsoft ('s lawyers?), and that single act essentially made their case that it was a bad-faith registration

Microsoft has a point, no matter they deceived him.
Eventually, he tried to profit off the domain name, because if the company asking for the domain wasn't Microsoft, and if he wasn't aware of the phonetic similarities, he'd never ask for $10,000.