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.
