Hoist with their own FUD: an old marketing tactic is backfiring

Established IT vendors have long relied on "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" to scare their customers away from the upstarts. But customers are getting tired of it, and a new generation of vendors is finding that FUD only makes them stronger.

By  Jim Romeo, LinuxWorld.com, 11/29/07

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Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, or FUD, is an old sword with a new blade in today’s competitive IT world. If you cannot beat ‘em, create controversy. But the old tactic is starting to lose its effectiveness.

One current example of FUD is the latest flare-up in the long trend of tension between the open source community and Microsoft. Microsoft has stated that various players within the open source community are infringing its patents, and some open source firms have denied it. FUD seems to be as much a part of IT competitition as ever—or is it?

"Hmmm... as the old saying goes, 'there is nothing new under the sun,' says Dave Roberts, VP of Strategy and Marketing at Vyatta, which competes with the established Cisco in routers, selling an open source product line that, the company says, delivers twice the performance of older proprietary routers at half the price. "FUD has been around as long as marketing has, which is to say forever," Roberts says. "Insofar as that's the case, I don't really see anything new in FUD. While technology advances and topics change, FUD has and will continue to be used as a part of the marketer's toolbox.”

However, some see some new tint in the color of FUD as it unfolds on the landscape that open source serves. "The target and content of FUD, especially around open source, are changing," says Dirk Morris, CTO and Founder of network threat management company Untangle. "Sophisticated customers aren't listening to the old open source FUD, like it’s insecure or of poor quality, so they've tried new techniques like attacking the licensing issues or the threat of action from Microsoft or SCO on patent infringement."

While established vendors are the typical sources of FUD, some are starting to question it. William Hurley is the Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy at BMC Software, Inc., a proprietary management software firm which now faces competition from open source upstarts. He sees the FUD wars as putting the open source companies into the position of David, versus Goliath, and feels that open source start-ups are all too often viewed as a threat. Instead of attacking the newcomers with FUD attacks, the older proprietary firms should really be seeing them as an opportunity to partner. He believes that the open source start-ups are caught up in the same FUD practice that they loathe, by spinning the press in retort and playing the role of David. It becomes an unconstructive cycle.

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