Note that the Linux story is geared towards I.T. and not the home user. They want you to use anything they can get you to use on their hosted services because they know that's the only way for them to make money in the future. ALL programs, products, applications, data storage/sharing, etc... are moving towards hosted computing. Its getting too expensive to own your own servers and storage and redundancy.
For example, take a company that owns 25 sub-companies. Traditionally, all of those companies would have an H.R. department, a facilities department, an accounting department, perhaps a production department, advertising, etc... And each of those companies would have their own I.T. department, servers, storage, programs, licensing, networking, etc.... so now you have 25 redundant departments and 25 redundant sets of servers that are probably 90% idle all the time (just look at your own PC usage stats, its 99% idle most of the time).
So, you build up two hosting facilities with blade servers and scalable storage for redundancey, cough up some dedicated networking between the sites, set up one of each department at your HQ, and only have a few sub-managers at your 25 locations. You get PCs with remote desktop or terminal services and run all of your apps web-based back to your HQ.
You've eliminated 24 manager positions right off the bat. Plus bunches of I.T. staff. Plus bunches of H.R. staff. Plus 23 sets of servers and storage. Plus all the electricity to run them and the HVAC expenses to keep them happy. You contract out with local companies to provide PC swap-out services/networking at your 25 sub-companies, or maybe just keep one I.T. staff at each location.
Then you still want to cut expenses, so you host all of it with Microsoft cloud services, eliminate all of your servers and storage and most of your I.T. staff that is left, convert your computer room to a break room, trust Microsoft with all of your data and hope to god they don't hose you with an outage or hack.....