Hats off to Daryl Taft from e-Week for his interview with Steve Ballmer on Enterprise Tools. This is one of the few interviews I have seen that probes Ballmer on the developer tools market.
In the article, Ballmer acknowledges that Eclipse is the main competitor for Microsoft in the tools area. I think everyone agrees there are two main platforms: Eclipse and Visual Studio.
I did find it interesting that he discounts Eclipse on Windows. Indicating that our momentum is on non-Windows platform: ‘There’s certainly some momentum, at least among the non-Windows platforms building around Eclipse.’ Not sure if I agree with this. A great majority of our downloads are for the Windows version.
In fact, I think a lot of developers are using Eclipse and Visual Studio side-by-side. It is a heterogeneous world and developers need to develop for .Net and Java. If you ask me, a C# and .Net IDE would do really well at Eclipse. 
