[clear_dg]

I won't deny that the tech crowd can influence things, but it's become quite hard for regular users to quit the whole Google panoply of services and tech products. Mail, browser, maps, dns, search, etc... It isn't painless and easy to abandon all of this and I have doubts even tech-savvy influencers can counter it at this point, only by word of mouth.

And about how Chrome got a foothold in the first place, I distinctly remember Google agressively advertising their own product on their search engine page, and bundling the binary with everything under the sun (Adobe Reader, anti-virus, etc...). Every time you installed software, there was a good chance Chrome was included with it. Tech influencers had their part in the success of Chrome, but it definitely wasn't the only factor, or maybe even the most important one.