For that matter, Apple aggressive marketed to the techie-and-designer crowd for years, even while everyone knew aiming products at programmers was far lower margin than mass-market stuff. The payoff wasn't bottom line profits, it was cachet and technical support and useful software that ran nicely on Macs.

For something like Chrome, one price of alienating devs is, among other things, that everyone who thinks "damn, I wish I had an extension for X, I guess I'll make one!" develops it for Firefox instead.