Linus is naive and ignoring Microsoft's history.

You are oversimplifying the goals. There's more to it. Or you just repeat what the MSM is reporting about the Pirate Party. But the MSM is in fear right now because they have the most to lose from a success of the Pirate Parties. Here's the program of the German Piratenpartei: http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Bundestagswahlprogramm_Kernthemen

What's a Hasselhoff?

You couldn't view a web page with a gopher client. Times change. If you can't view a current page and all current browsers are capable of it, then you have to install the required software. The software is free and available for all platforms. And can be installed in parallel to old browsers like IE8, if you are on Windows. This has nothing to do with the "Best viewed in XYZ" we saw the last century. It's not a fight between to companies. We have open standards and all organizations support them, except one.

HTML5 is supported in all browsers but one. And it's OK to install a HTML5-capable browser parallel to the broken one, if you really need it.

I can't even stand the video on http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/ :-(

People don't care. Really. There was a worm a few years ago that sent office documents to random e-mail addresses. I received an Excel price list from a bike shop. A co-worker some Word documents from a doctor. People don't care. They continue to use this kind of software and putting documents on Google's site isn't less secure than what they are doing right now.