"His opinion on desktop software is as meaningful as his opinions on rocket ships, film production, oil recovery techniques, sociology, religious history, automobile engineering or any of the other topics he has no meaningful expertise in."
His opinion on desktop software is valuable to me. Why? Because he's obviously a very smart person. And I listen to smart people a lot more closely than I listen to just anyone. I would trust a physicist giving his opinions on the state of medical care more than I would a guy who believed the earth was flat.
It's not because someone is an expert at one thing that their opinion on a totally different subject matters at all. that's the point the articles wants to make, and I totally agree with that principle. We see a bunch of artists taking political stances, for example, and I do not even bother listening to any of them because they just see thing through a very narrow window. Just like Linus when he says the default desktop resolution should be Retina-like, he completely ignores the effect of scale, the fact that you need new lines to make such screens, and that there will be a lag from the time it becomes standard. And he simply does not consider the fact that someone who buys a low to mid-end Laptop does not care about resolution at all. They just want something that works. If they cared about screen resolutions or even screen quality, then no laptop PC in the 500 dollars range would sell at all. But they do. And it's not Linus who buy them, so he does not understand these people and his opinion is only valid for his personal use case.
"His opinion on desktop software is as meaningful as his opinions on rocket ships, film production, oil recovery techniques, sociology, religious history, automobile engineering or any of the other topics he has no meaningful expertise in."
His opinion on desktop software is valuable to me. Why? Because he's obviously a very smart person. And I listen to smart people a lot more closely than I listen to just anyone. I would trust a physicist giving his opinions on the state of medical care more than I would a guy who believed the earth was flat.