.NET developer statistics - a word from Microsoft

Microsoft's John Montgomery is quoted in Chris Sells' Weblog regarding the numbers that Microsoft has on .NET developers worldwide. There are roughly 6 million professional developers worldwide, about 90% of whom target Windows. 4-5 million of those 6 million developers targeting Windows are Visual Basic developers. There are about 2.5 mln .NET developers. More than 60% of the Fortune 100 develop using .NET. Forrester says that 56% of enterprises in North America are choosing .NET for their development requirements vs. 44% choosing J2EE.