From the
JargonFile:
When someone who should know better succumbs to marketing influences and actually begins to believe
the propaganda being dished out by a vendor, they are said to have drunk the Kool-Aid. Usually the
decortication process is slow and almost unnoticeable until one day the victim emerges as a True
Believer and begins spreading the faith himself.
The term originates in the suicide of 914 followers of Jim Jones's People's Temple cult in Guyana in
1978 (there are also resonances with Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests from the 1960s).
Can also refer to vendor lock-in. For example, Exchange Server comes with a big pitcher of Microsoft Kool-Aid.
Examples of use:
"They drank the XML Kool-Aid."