Sure, but how does that help you chose an effective strategy? For example, winning lottery players absolutely dominate when it comes to risk vs reward. But that doesn't mean playing the lottery is the way to achieving your financial goals.
Without an understanding of the underlying odds of success, isolated success stories are just random noise. And you have to ask: are they really success stories? Did Linus set out to create a world known free kernel, or was ìt just serendipty, he was just a random bloke who filled a role that needed to be filled at that particular historic time, so in fact had no control over the story and did not, in fact, change the world, he just gave a name of the rough thing that was to appear at that rough time.
Effective strategy, you are right. It's not. For the thing that was to appear, we can't know if something else would have filled that functional void. The world might have been much more proprietary without Linux.
For this particular example, I think there were worthy contenders in the era, like Minix, GNU Hurd, BSD etc. So it was rather a sum of unpredictable contingencies (in the philosophical sense) that made Linux the thing that was to be, rather than any substantial merit of its inventors; much like Facebook won the social network race by simply being lucky to launch in a cool, selective and influential community.
But in the general case, I do not claim that the world works according to a pre-written script, on the contrary, if you act with a sufficient magnitude of power, I think you can alter it deterministically. Rather, I point out the immense inertia and active opposition by the powerful to you world-altering attempts, to the point where any low power action is more like playing the lottery. You might be lucky to get the that one in a million chance, but you likely won't.
If you organize your attack carefully, amass capital, workforce, hearts and minds, etc., you drastically improve your chances of success, up to the point when your reach Elon mode: you simply wish a product or thing was real, and an entire army of people shows up ready to implement it.
