Beyond fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD)

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By Scott Brinker

If you've been at the intersection of business and technology for a while, you're probably familiar with fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).

I'm not talking about the natural stress, worry and concern that everyone feels in the course of their work. Instead, FUD is an intentional "tactic of rhetoric and fallacy" that has been used in sales and marketing, particularly in high-technology, to dissuade customers from considering a competitor's products.

By many accounts FUD-as-strategy took hold with IBM in the 1970's. Open source advocate Eric S. Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, sums it up like this:

The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. The 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. After 1991 the term has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.

So the saying used to go, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment." By the 1990's, however, Microsoft had become the primary FUD-slinger in the industry, ironically using FUD against IBM in the fight of Windows vs. OS2. (Yes, those who live by FUD, die by the FUD.)

Beyond fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD)

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