[gwern]

I was also a little puzzled by

> In the nineties, Microsoft pursued a canonical FUD strategy, creating phony error messages to make consumers wary of using Windows on a competitor’s operating system—a tactic that resulted in a legal settlement exceeding two hundred million dollars.

[acdha]

I believe that’s a reference to this code and the resulting court case:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

[gwern]

Huh. I was thinking it was something to do with MS Word or other MS apps (which I know often had cross-OS or alternate OS versions, like Mac support). But no, that is indeed about... running Windows on a non-MS OS (non-MS DOS). Back when Windows was a GUI shell around DOS. Now that is history.