If any FUDsters ever come clean, this would make for a great book....the penny stock that even msft couldn't kill....lol...just some creative suppositions.

See the section on Contemporary examples (scroll down)

FUD was first defined (circa 1975) 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."[4] The term has also been attributed to veteran Morgan Stanley computer analyst Ulrich Weil, though it had already been used in other contexts as far back as the 1920s.[5][6]

As Eric S. Raymond writes:[7]

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.

[edit] Contemporary examples

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:[8]

The leaked internal Microsoft "Halloween documents" stated "OSS is long-term credible … [therefore] FUD tactics cannot be used to combat it."[9], in fact Open source (OSS) and the GNU/Linux community in particular are widely perceived as frequent targets of Microsoft FUD:

• Statements about the "viral nature"[10] of the GNU General Public License (GPL),
• Statements that "...FOSS infringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents." before software patent law precedents were established. [11]