If you’ve ever taken a 101-level business, economics, or information technology course, you may recognize the term “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” and its acronym, FUD. The phrase’s origins date back to the 1920s and was often used as a sales technique where the salesperson would work to create FUD so that their customers would not consider switching to a competitor’s product or service. The term is often linked to IBM in the 1960s which used the practice to keep their clients from switching to other technology companies’ products – there’s that old axiom, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment.”
