Now, I am a fairly young person myself, but the author is in 8th grade. I'm not sure he's qualified to talk about changes in the market over a few years.
It's not too young for an interested person to know this stuff. In the eighth grade, I was already dual-booting Linux on the family computer, was following VA Linux Systems' and Red Hat's IPOs, and was looking for alternatives to MS Office for my school.
It's the innate understanding of the market viewed from a teenage perspective--they already count Microsoft out.
Observation is available to anyone at any age. A person who is outside of the tech bubble may also look at the market from a psychological point of view rather than a pragmatic one.