That's an awfully fine straw man you've got there. I see you knit him a sweater and everything!
Until the past couple of years, most of the tech community has conceded that linux on the desktop was not ready for primetime. Hell, even now, there isn't a consensus and most would not recommend it to those on "the outside."
I honestly don't know if the tech community has a non-proportional influence over those on the outside, but your statement is almost a non-sequitur.
>Until the past couple of years, most of the tech community has conceded that linux on the desktop was not ready for primetime. Hell, even now, there isn't a consensus and most would not recommend it to those on "the outside."
No, I just have a longer perspective. You're probably too young to remember that most of the tech community, their mother and their dogs considered Linux "ready for the primetime" during late 199x.
The time when every other pundit was quoting "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and VCs invested in several Linux distributions (which included relatively established companies like Corel, Novell, et al). There wasn't even OS X (or Google) to keep them amused, it was all Linux and OSS.
It was said to happen "any day now", nay, it was "already happening". Including huge over-valuation for Linux companies, from VA Linux to Eazel and whatever Xamarin was called back then. They abandoned that thinking around 2000-2002, after the dot com crash etc.
If Google loses their hold over tech people, that will spread quickly.