Developers were important for microsoft. Having developers tied to their platform meant software being written for it.
Well, now Microsoft is losing developers, while Apple is always winning more of them (I won't talk about GNU/Linux which is king supreme on the server side, but not yet on desktop).
Why is that? Well, many thing must be taken into account. The iDevices for example. There are many developers writing iPhhone, iPod touch and iPad applications. You only can do that from a mac, and once you have learned that (as officially most software must be written in objective-c using xcode) you are ready to easily write mac applications too.
Switching to intel architecture was a very very clever thing for Apple to do, because people have the possibility to run Windows on their macs too, either native via BootCamp or on a virtual machine. Many people were afraid of switching to a mac because they were relying on some windows software, which now they can use without problems.
But, the best... any developer who now uses a mac has their development environment ready, and free of cost. And when start to use it and step the learning curve of a new language, because objective-c isn't used much outside of the mac world, they start to appreciate the beauties of Cocoa, the heir of Next.
Let's be clear, Microsoft has done some wonderful things too, but when you have to deal with the absurd complexities of a system which was, in theory, designed to hide them... you find that something isn't working as it should.
If microsoft is losing developers which are going to other platforms, there's noone to blame more than the own Microsoft. They are doing things difficult for their own developers, while others have been trying sine years to make averything easier, more clear and more confortable for them.
Microsoft, you are slowly but steadily loosing points there. If you want to rise again, you know what you need: Developers, developers, developers...
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