I don't think they ever directly publish that, but they did publish in 2010, producers of Visual Studio extensions brought in over $400 million in revenue. Considering the people buying those extensions have a full version of Visual Studio, and the cost of VS and MSDN subscriptions, I would not be surprised if those two things account for most of that $5 billion.
Wow. In that case, it seems like it ought to be tempting to double the cost of Visual Studio and give non-business copies of Windows away.
You'd think. But that would reduce the number of Windows developers, so doing that would be eating the seed corn.
Definitely not true. I am a former employee who worked on Visual Studio.
Visual Studio is close to a $1 billion business. The lion's share of the Server and Tools Division is licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server.
considering windows server and mssql server are also in that division i highly doubt that!