You're saying Windows' appeal to developers is mainly due to Steve Ballmer embarrassing himself onstage and little or nothing to do with how many users the platform has? I find that quite incredible.
Microsoft has a long history of bending over backwards for developers, even going so far as to put one-off patches in its own libraries to fix bugs in 3rd party applications.
No, I'm saying that Microsoft believes that by bringing the best developers to their side, good apps will be made, and then users will follow. That's why he was screaming that.
Now, you may disagree with the way that they're going about doing that, but from what I understand, tools like Visual Studio really are best of breed. I don't use IDEs or Windows, so I wouldn't know, but that's just what I hear.
Yes, they have really great development tools. They really do. But no sane person would look at Microsoft and say Visual Studio .NET is the reason they've dominated the PC market for almost two decades. People develop for Windows because everybody uses Windows. If nobody used Windows, VS would not be enough to keep people developing for the platform.
