...a programmer who works for a living, in a world in which the Mac accounts for only about less than 10% of the computers in existence. 90% of the time you have no choice but to write software for Windows PCs, if you intend to make a living at it.
Further, imagine you work for an employer who looks at the situation and concludes that it's uneconomical to devote disproportionate resources to recreating your company's software to run on the Mac; but being unable to let go of 10% of anything, your corporate masters fund the development of automated tools to translate software written for Windows into a form in which it can run on the Mac. Now, 99% of the world's programmers write for Windows, and the other 1% just clicks a button to make the conversion.
All that assumes we're talking about "consumer" software, the kind you run yourself on your own computer. Then there's the Internet, where you write software to run on the servers. Software for servers is a whole different thing, and in that world there's another major alternative, called "LAMP", based not on Windows but the Linux operating system.
But I digress. You brought up the trials and travails of using microsoft.com, and I was just bemoaning the fact that programmers don't have the luxury of boycotting the Microsoft Web site for programmers. Even though these days my server work is all LAMP and I'm off the Microsoft server treadmill, I also write the part of the Web site software that runs in your browser, and since Microsoft Internet Explorer accounts for the majority of browsers in the world, there I go, back to microsoft.com, to read up on the quirks and incompatibilities of Internet Explorer. A programmer just cannot escape Microsoft!