Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

This page is on marketing in the technology industry; for larger use, see appeal to fear.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is a sales or marketing strategy of disseminating negative (and vague) information on a competitor's product. The term originated to describe disinformation tactics in the computer hardware industry and has since been used more broadly. FUD is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

Definition

FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: "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 term has also been attributed to veteran Morgan Stanley computer analyst Ulrich Weil.

As Eric S. Raymond writes: "The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers 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. After 1991 the term has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon."

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 wares, 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 result is that many companies' IT departments buy software that they know to be technically inferior because upper management is more likely to recognize the brand.

Recent developments

Although once it was usually attributed to IBM, in the 1990s and later the term became most often associated with industry giant Microsoft. Said Roger Irwin:

Microsoft soon picked up the art of FUD from IBM, and throughout the 80's used FUD as a primary marketing tool, much as IBM had in the previous decade. They ended up out FUD-ding IBM themselves during the OS2 vs Win3.1 years.

The Halloween documents (leaked internal Microsoft documents whose authenticity was verified by the company) use the term FUD to describe a potential tactic, as in "OSS is long-term credible … [therefore] FUD tactics cannot be used to combat it." More recently, Microsoft has issued statements about the "viral nature" of the GNU General Public License (GPL), which Open Source proponents describe as FUD. Microsoft's statements are often directed at the GNU/Linux community in particular, to discourage widespread Linux adoption, which is gaining market share off Microsoft.

SCO vs. IBM

The SCO Group's 2003 lawsuit against IBM, claiming $5 billion in intellectual property infringements by the free software community, is seen by many inside and out of the open source community as FUD. IBM noted in its counterclaim, that SCO is spreading "fear, uncertainty, and doubt".

There has been no evidence presented that IBM violated SCO's intellectual property rights by distributing a Linux distribution with copied code. A months long study commissioned by SCO before the legal action "...found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever." and no published accounts uphold SCO's position of stolen code.

Judge Kimball wrote 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."

The fact that there is no substantiation of the claims didn't stop SCO from launching a very public fear campaign in 2003.

Darl McBride, President and CEO of SCO:

1. "IBM has taken our valuable trade secrets and given them away to Linux,"
2. "We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code"
3. "...unless more companies start licensing SCO's property...[SCO]may also sue Linus Torvalds...for patent infringement."
4. "Both companies [IBM and Red Hat] have shifted liability to the customer and then taunted us to sue them."
5. "We have the ability to go to users with lawsuits and we will if we have to, “It would be within SCO Group's rights to order every copy of AIX [IBM'S proprietary UNIX] destroyed,"
6. "As of Friday, June 13[2003], we will be done trying to talk to IBM, and we will be talking directly to its customers and going in and auditing them."IBM no longer has the authority to sell or distribute AIX and customers no longer have the right to use AIX software"
7. "if you just drag this out in a typical litigation path, where it takes years and years to settle anything, and in the meantime you have all this uncertainty clouding over the market..."
8. "users are running systems that have basically pirated software inside, or stolen software inside of their systems, they have liability."

The campaign evidently worked as SCO stock skyrocketed from under $5 a share to over $20 in a matter of weeks in 2003. It has since declined to around $1.20 as it has posted losses of nearly $40 million since 2003.

Non-computer uses

Main article: appeal to fear

FUD is now often used in non-computer contexts with the same meaning. For example, in politics the tactic is often used to attempt to alter public opinion on a particular issue or on an opposing group. Often, one group will accuse another group of utilizing FUD. Many critics of George W. Bush accused him of using a FUD-based campaign in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Bush supporters likewise accused their opponents of using FUD by spreading rumors about a possible military draft should Bush be re-elected.

See also

• Fanboyism
• Chewbacca defense
• Embrace, extend and extinguish
• Propaganda
• Tin-foil hat

External links

• FUDZilla (archived project on Libervis)
• FUD (or the original page on the Internet Archive)
• The FUD FAQ (particularly as applied to the Linux operating system and the modern-day open source software movement)
• A Brief History of a Microsoft FUD