The Halloween Document 

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     By the late 1990's, Microsoft had long been established as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the personal computer industry. Naturally, there also existed a constant hurricane of conspiracy theories on how Microsoft ascended and maintained this dominance. The so-called Halloween documents kicked up a whole new storm, this time among the emergent open sources software community LINUX. 

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DR-DOS Fake error message​

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Speaking of FUD, Microsoft was also at the time involved in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit with Caldera, which had recently acquired the competing DR-DOS operating system. Caldera accused Microsoft of several law library shelves' worth of anti competitive practices going back to the early 1990's--including the curious case of the False Error Message. The message was designed to scare off DR-DOS users, according to the Caldera suit, the user is supposed to feel uncomfortable when he has a bug and suspect the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS.

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Silicon Valley Wage Fixing​

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   Conspiracies in the tech world aren't limited to hardware and software, of course. Sometimes they're in the HR department. To wit, the infamous anti poaching conspiracy that recently rocked, and is still rocking, several major players in Silicon Valley.

According to the class-action suit initially filed in 2011, hiring executives at Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe agreed not to compete over skilled tech workers. By not poaching each others' talent, the companies kept workers locked in place and prevented wages from rising with competitive hiring. In August, a federal judge in San Jose that would have resolved the class-action suit, deeming the figure too low. The ruling also singled out late Apple czar Steve Jobs as "a, if not the, central figure in the alleged conspiracy." The companies promptly appealed the ruling.