Calling early winners is a longstanding pastime of tech...the Internet protocol stack was the dark horse candidate in telecom circles back in the 80's. Apple was "done for" in the mid-90's, in the same boat as Commodore, Atari and all the rest.

The reason to engage like this is basically a mindless chasing after of hierarchy: you want everyone to know who their overlord is now. This is very important to a certain kind of mind in a certain kind of position, because they will start engaging with that as if it were already true and make business decisions presuming the winner...and to be right, everyone else needs to go along with it. Otherwise they're the weird guy at the meeting, talking about the also-ran.