I have not worked at Google. My assumption was that they wanted to avoid the GPL and avoid Linux's strick userspace backwards compatibility to get things upstreamed.
I still hear the words of a (quite incompetent and unpleasant) PM at a place I worked at in 2000-2001; we were having some problems (glitches on network traffic triggered by a GFX card interrupt) with Tru64 on Alpha machines and since we had a lot of hardware at hand we installed Linux (RedHat if memory serves) for comparison tests and the problem disappeared, so we jokingly told "well, then just ask the client to install Linux, they'll also save a lot in licenses since it's free". His reply: "Linux? Nah, that's an hobby project, the customer uses professional software". Two years later the PM had been sacked and the customer was starting to migrate everything to Linux. Too bad I already left the year before, but that's how life goes.
I recall using Linux around 2000. Calling it "hobby project" might be derogatory, but it was definitely very rough on the edges. For perspective, the infamous SCO lawsuits, which to me marks the moment Linux was officially deemed a competitor and a threat by established companies in the industry, only took off nearly a decade after this date.
Back in 2000 I wouldn't have risked my career by suggesting my company's product line should depend on it to run.
Also, a lot changes in two years, specially in IT circles. I also recall back in the early 2000s people rushed to install new development versions of distro releases because those would finally add critical feature/fix an egregious bug even at the expense of introducing regressions. Knoppix was only released late 2000, which goes to show how untested this domain was back then.
Other than that, it was something we dual booted at home by not being able to afford big UNIX.