Not long after the release of Vista, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, claimed that Microsoft sold 20 million licenses of Vista in its first month of availability. If you read Gartner’s recently released figures for sales in the PC market in the first quarter you discover that sales for the whole quarter amounted to a little over 62.7 million units – which is more than 20 million per month and amounts to an 8.9% year-on-year growth. It’s reasonable to assume that at least some of that 8.9% growth is driven by Vista, consisting of PC buyers who delayed purchase until Vista was launched or who responded to the vast Vista marketing push.

However, when you take a look at the PC figures for the US a completely different picture emerges. In the US, 14,811,000 PCs were shipped, indicating only 2.9% growth in PC sales in the first quarter. In other words the impact on PC sales of Vista appears to have far lower in the US. But actually that 2.9% figure is not what it seems, because 1.15% of that growth is attributable directly to Apple. The sale of Apple Macs grew by 30% in the quarter as they have in quarter after quarter for quite a while now. In other words Vista made no competitive dent whatsoever in the sale of Macs – and that very bad news for Microsoft.

We are witnessing a tipping point in the PC market. Apple now has 5% of the US market, which may seem small, but that 5% punches well above its weight because Apple focuses on the home market – that 5% is more like 15% of the people that actually choose their PCs (in the corporations you get what you are given) and at current rates of growth that 15% will be 30% in the US in about 2 years, unless Apple’s momentum slows. Now consider the fact that the US market drives PC buying trends in the rest of the world to some degree and Apple’s momentum comes more into focus.

Apple’s momentum has not been stopped at all by Vista, and this is ahead of the release of Apple’s answer to Vista – the Leopard version of OS X. Let me just speculate a little on that. I think Apple put back the release of Leopard because it concluded that it didn’t need to worry about Vista. I don’t believe Apple’s explanation, that it had to borrow OS X engineers to help with the release of the iPhone – Apple cannot possibly be short of engineers. I think that Steve Jobs took the decision to embed some of the iPhone magic in OS X or add a little magic to both platforms so that, when Leopard is released, it will make Vista look old and tired. Delaying Leopard delays the almost guaranteed $100 million income that Leopard will generate in its first month or two and it will cause some buyers (and I’m one of them) to delay buying a Mac until they can get one that is built for Leopard – which is more $millions of deferred income. Apple is not deferring that income because it is short of engineers.