Gary Kasparov became the World Chess Champion in 1985, following his second match against reigning champion Anatoly Karpov. The first match (started in 1984) had been abandoned inconclusively, under unusual circumstances. The rules for the first match were that the first player to win 6 games would be declared the winner.

For Karpov, this first match began very well. He won one game, then another game, then another, with most of his wins being separated by drawn games. At this level of chess drawn games are frequent. It seemed that Karpov was destined to win after he had won 5 games without Kasparov winning any. They had played 27 games in total, at that point. Then in game 32 Kasparov won.

I remember reading Kasparov’s account of this 32nd game. He said that during the game “he felt the electricity pass from Karpov to him”. After that Karpov was unable to win the final sixth game that he needed for victory. The match was abandoned when Kasparov won the 48th game, with Karpov declaring himself unable to continue (even though he still led 5 games to 3). Another match was arranged later in the year under slightly different rules and Kasparov won it.

In my view, Kasparov’s account of the 32nd game describes a phenomenon, which I think of as “the spark”. In the 32nd game, “the spark” moved from Karpov to him and, despite the situation at the time, the reign of Karpov was over.

Think of any contest for dominance and this phenomenon seems to be present—so much so that whoever has the spark appears bullet-proof for a while. Xerxes lost the spark to the Greeks at Thermopylae. Caesar gained it when he crossed the Rubicon. Hitler lost it in the ruins of Stalingrad. It’s easy to see in retrospect, of course.

But this is exactly how I think about Apple’s current run of success. Clearly the company was rescued from oblivion when Steve-this-time-it’s-personal-Jobs returned. He may have galvanized the company, but that didn’t guarantee dominance by any means. The iPod breathed financial life into Apple, but it didn’t guarantee dominance either—after all it was just a 21st century Walkman. The spark moved to Apple when it delivered the Tiger version of OS X and then, in short order, moved to Intel chips.

What am I thinking?

Simply this. Apple is going to dominate home computing (in the developed world) for the foreseeable future and it’s too late now for Microsoft, Dell, HP, Toshiba or anyone else to change this. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will. There are too many straws in the wind for me to believe otherwise. The spark moved to Apple about a year ago.

I personally became an Apple user before then, with the release of Tiger. (I was sick of losing days of my time to Microsoft). The buzz around Apple at the time was not high volume, but since then the drum beat has been sounding louder. Many people who would never have dreamed of buying a Mac are now in the market for one. Many will buy Apple next time around and after that they wont switch easily. No matter how much noise Microsoft makes around Vista, it isn’t going to dent this. Vista is a “Tiger catch-up” and by the time it hits the streets, Microsoft will be behind yet again, and trying to catch its breath. It’s too late.

The market stats are beginning to show this—but only just. Apple now has 12 percent of the laptop market and about 6 percent of the desktop market in the US. But if you focus only on the home PC market (about 60 percent of the US PC market is corporate) the market share is bigger than it appears. Apple’s growth is running at roughly 30 percent—about 3 times the industry growth.

Microsoft got the spark when it began to divorce itself from its joint OS/2 project with IBM, just after 1990. It seemed inconceivable at the time that it could challenge IBM’s dominance of the industry. Microsoft had revenues of just over a $1billion. But Microsoft had already won—just as now, it has already lost.