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.