Re: MS web designers -- "What Security Initiative?"

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004 00:11:50 +1000, Dave Horsfall <dave () horsfall org>  said:
> On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, David Maxwell wrote:
>
> > For years, Microsoft has had a policy of announcing products that don't
> > exist yet, to cause customers to stop buying a competitor's product.
> > That's Vapourware.
>
> Hah - M$ is new at that game.  IBM did it for years back in the 70s.

IBM was even better at it than that - the acronym FUD came about to describe
the IBM tactic of telling customers that a 3rd party something might not work
within the context of IBM's latest "future direction" whitepaper. (Note that
these were clearly *NOT* product announcements, but were specifically "We're
going THIS way" statements).

Most of the time, the IBM salescritters were at least reasonably good about
only spreading FUD based on already-released future direction statements (but
I've seen the occasional forward reference to an upcoming statement. ;)

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