Hi, I was wondering if anyone knows where I can find developer statistics, in particular how many developers are targeting Windows desktop and/or servers? I'm interested in both game developers and software developers in general. I tried googling, but I'm having a really hard time finding anything that's not mobile.

(I work with development tools and could use some data for business decisions)

That will be a very hard number to find. Mobile is mostly a controlled access kind of thing, but desktops and servers have long been a statistically awkward free for all. I write software as a professional developer targeting mostly linux servers, but I have a bit of deployed code out there in the wild running on windows servers. However, you're not very likely to find my work on any statistical analysis database, and you're not even going to find me listed anywhere as a normal business.

Plus there is also the awkwardly nebulous nature of software developers. I know a group of five developers, and between them they have I think eight 'companies' offering different products and services. Do you count them as five developers, or eight? Or eight companies with 2-4 developers each?

If you work with development tools, I am pretty sure there is still a large percentage of developers who use Windows as their primary development box. You are not looking for developers targeting Windows OS, but you are looking for how many developers are using Windows OS.

If you work with development tools, I am pretty sure there is still a large percentage of developers who use Windows as their primary development box. You are not looking for developers targeting Windows OS, but you are looking for how many developers are using Windows OS.

Wrong, I'm looking for people targeting Windows, not just developing on it. They can use either Windows or Linux for the development, it's the target that's interesting in this case.

That will be a very hard number to find. Mobile is mostly a controlled access kind of thing, but desktops and servers have long been a statistically awkward free for all. I write software as a professional developer targeting mostly linux servers, but I have a bit of deployed code out there in the wild running on windows servers. However, you're not very likely to find my work on any statistical analysis database, and you're not even going to find me listed anywhere as a normal business.

Plus there is also the awkwardly nebulous nature of software developers. I know a group of five developers, and between them they have I think eight 'companies' offering different products and services. Do you count them as five developers, or eight? Or eight companies with 2-4 developers each?

We are looking for some rough figures for potential customers. I suppose something like number of full-time workers or something.

We are looking for some rough figures for potential customers. I suppose something like number of full-time workers or something.

Well, like Luckless already said it will be very hard, if not impossible, to find numbers that are somewhat accurate. As all the tools that are necessary to develop for Windows are available for free pretty much everybody can download them and start writing code.
If your product targets companies above a certain size you might be able to get some information about such companies using company regisers and your preferred search engine.

Our current strategy is pretty much trying to search tags in sites like stackoverflow and try to correlate the number with corresponding numbers on other platform where we have better statistics.