Fear, uncertainty and doubt

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

Definition

The term "fear, uncertainty and doubt" appeared as far back as the 1920s, whereas the similar formulation "doubts, fears and uncertainties" reaches back to 1693. By 1975, the term was appearing abbreviated as FUD in marketing and sales contexts as well as in public relations:

The abbreviation FUD is also alternatively rendered as "fear, uncertainty and disinformation".

FUD was first used with its common current technology-related meaning by Gene Amdahl in 1975, after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.:

This usage of FUD to describe disinformation in the computer hardware industry is said to have led to subsequent popularization of the term.

As Eric Steven Raymond wrote:

By spreading questionable information about the drawbacks of less well-known products, an established company can discourage decision-makers from choosing those products over its own, regardless of the relative ''technical'' merits. This is a recognized phenomenon, epitomized by the traditional axiom of purchasing agents that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment". The aim is to have IT departments buy software they know to be technically inferior because upper management is more likely to recognize the brand.

Examples

Tobacco Industry

The strategy of deliberately sowing doubts about scientific findings was used by the Tobacco Industry.

Software producers

Microsoft

From the 1990s onward, the term became most often associated with Microsoft. Roger Irwin said:

In 1996, Caldera, Inc. accused Microsoft of several anti-competitive practices, including issuing vaporware announcements, creating FUD, and excluding competitors from participating in beta-test programs in order to destroy competition in the DOS market.
One of the claims was related to having modified Windows 3.1 so that it would not run on DR DOS 6.0 although there were no technical reasons for it not to work. This was caused by the so-called AARD code, some encrypted piece of code, which had been found in a number of Microsoft programs. The code would fake nonsensical error messages if run on DR DOS, like:

If the user chose to press , Windows would continue to run on DR DOS without problems. While it had been already speculated in the industry that the purpose of this code was to create doubts about DR DOS's compatibility and thereby destroy the product's reputation, internal Microsoft memos published as part of the ''United States v. Microsoft'' antitrust case later revealed that the specific focus of these error messages was DR DOS. At one point, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sent a memo to a number of employees, reading
Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg later sent another memo, stating
In 2000, Microsoft settled the lawsuit out-of-court for an undisclosed sum, which in 2009 was revealed to be $280 million.

At around the same time, the leaked internal Microsoft "Halloween documents" stated " OSS pen Source Softwareis long-term credible… hereforeFUD tactics cannot be used to combat it."
Open source software, and the Linux community in particular, are widely perceived as frequent targets of Microsoft's FUD:
* Statements about the " viral nature" of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
* Statements that "… FOSS ree and open source softwareinfringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents", before software patent law precedents were even established.
* Statements that Windows Server 2003 has lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than Linux, in Microsoft's "Get-The-Facts" campaign. It turned out that they were comparing Linux on a very expensive IBM mainframe to Windows Server 2003 on an Intel Xeon-based server.
* A 2010 video claimed that OpenOffice.org had a higher long-term cost of ownership, as well as poor interoperability with Microsoft's own office suite. The video featured statements such as "If an open source freeware solution breaks, who's gonna fix it?"

''SCO v. IBM''

The SCO Group's 2003 lawsuit against IBM, funded by Microsoft, claiming $5 billion in intellectual property infringements by the free software community, is an example of FUD, according to IBM, which argued in its counterclaim that SCO was spreading "fear, uncertainty, and doubt".

Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells wrote (and Judge Dale Albert Kimball concurred) in her order limiting SCO's claims: "The court finds SCO's arguments unpersuasive. SCO's arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM, 'sorry, we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know...' SCO was required to disclose in detail what it feels IBM misappropriated... the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is... not placing all the details on the table. Certainly if an individual were stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole, I'm not telling.' Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say 'it's in there somewhere, you figure it out.

Regarding the matter, Darl Charles McBride, President and CEO of SCO, made the following statements:

# "IBM has taken our valuable trade secrets and given them away to Linux,"
# "We're finding... cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code"
# "...unless more companies start licensing SCO's property... COmay also sue Linus Torvalds... for patent infringement."
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