In the IT world, FUD is a very useful acronym: it’s short for fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Wikipedia defines FUD as:

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), is a tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics and propaganda.

FUD is generally a strategic attempt to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information. An individual firm, for example, might use FUD to invite unfavourable opinions and speculation about a competitor’s product; to increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers; or to maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival.

The term originated to describe disinformation tactics in the computer hardware industry but has since been used more broadly. FUD is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

As you’ll find if you read further down the Wikipedia entry, Microsoft, that superannuated leviathan of the proprietary software world, is no stranger to FUD. Indeed, it seems to have roused its sales partners to use it to help promote Office 2013/Office 365, the latest versions of its bloated, overpriced and ubiquitous office suite.

This came to my attention courtesy of Misco, who are kind enough to send my recycling box lots of sales material once a month. Included in this month’s batch of recycling was a 2-page spread for MS Office. Included in the ‘Top reasons to buy Office” was the following dubious information (reproduced verbatim from the leaflet):

End of Support

Running Office 2003 and Windows XP after the end-of-support date (April 8, 2014) may expose your company to security, compliance and compatibility risks due to a lack of ongoing updates.

Several points can be made about this misleading statement.

Firstly, all Microsoft products are insecure: just ask any decent, competent sysadmin.

Secondly, what’s all this ‘compliance risk’ about then? Is Microsoft revoking all Office licences for Office 2003 and older versions and sending in the software police? I think we should be told.

Thirdly, as far compatibility is concerned, users are wholly at the mercy of Microsoft as to how long files produced with earlier versions of Office programs can still be opened, read and edited using different versions of Office. This is vendor lock-in and it stinks.

Especially in these times of austerity when money is tight, my advice to anyone thinking of procuring or upgrading an office suite would be to look carefully at gratis open source alternatives to Office, such as:

• Apache OpenOffice – available for Linux, Mac and Windows;
• LibreOffice – a fork of OpenOffice – also available for Linux, Mac and Windows;
• Calligra – available for many Linux distributions and Free BSD and now with preliminary support for Windows and Mac.

All of these can also open and write files in Office formats, as well as working natively with Open Document Format – an international standard recognised by the ISO that’s being adopted increasingly by national governments across the world as a means of ensuring their documents can still be read in centuries to come.

I’ve been using open source office suites – principally OpenOffice and LibreOffice – in my professional capacity for the last 8 years and none of my clients – all of whom use Office – has reported problems opening the files I produce.