FUD: /fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to
found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that
IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who
might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was
to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with
competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally
accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people
who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of
competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term
FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has
become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a
competitive weapon.
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