In the conversation I had last week with Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications for Serena, he mentioned that Serena had given their employees the choice of whether to have a PC or a Mac, for a laptop or desktop. He said that roughly 60% chose to have a Mac. Such straws in the wind speak volumes.

Nowadays, whenever I run into software engineers or engineers of any kind, I ask them what computer they personally use. The answer is “The Mac” most of the time, and they often manage to persuade their employers to give them a Mac at work.

Why is that significant, given that most of the developers I run into are developing server software?

It’s significant because such people are opinion leaders. Most such individuals end up being technical support for those who have less affinity for silicon and now that so many of them have moved over to the Mac, they are dragging their dependents with them. (Which is exactly what I did when I moved to the Mac, turning my wife, my sister, my niece and two of my sons into Mac users.)

In commercial competition the marketing battle is often won long before the statisticians wander around the battlefield counting the dead and dying. This has happened with Apple. The point at which Microsoft might have been able to stop Apple was just before Apple moved to the Intel processor. At that time it would have been hard to diagnose Apple as a rising threat. The theory that it would stay confined to a “fan boy” niche seemed entirely tenable. But there were already straws in the wind. Apple had delivered iTunes to the PC and it had become the most popular PC app for many a year. Apple was already operating the only music store on the web that made business sense and actually attracted users. Apple stores started to sprout up in malls right across America. Apple was on a roll.

Once Apple moved to Intel and virtualization software appeared from Parallels, and then later VMware, it was pretty much game over, even though the market stats were still insisting that Apple was a niche vendor.

Market Share – October 2008

According to Apple’s COO, Tim Cook, about one third of the money spent on computers through US retail (31.3% if you want to be precise) is for Macs. In terms of units that “only” amounts to 17.5% because when people buy Macs they buy higher end models and spend more. About 400,000 people per day pass through Apple stores and it is still the case that 50% of Mac buyers are Windows refugees. Mac stores are so successful that Apple only has to open one in a new geographical area to alter the balance of Mac buyers among consumers.

The evidence seems to be that this is not a just US phenomenon, it happens all over the world, wherever Apple opens up a new store. Apple is thus able to expand its retail sales simply by opening up new stores – or by partnering with major electronics retailers around the world.

I reported last month that Apple is now, through no fault of its own, making inroads into the business market. A recent Yankee Group survey of 250 US companies found that 87% now have some Apple computers, up from 48% two years ago and the company estimates that Apple’s corporate market share has risen to 8-10% with 21% of firms reporting more than 50 Mac users. This figure is more than backed-up by AMI Partners, who report Apple’s desktop market share in the medium business segment (100-999 employees) to have grown to 27% from 13% in a year, with laptops growing to 18%. In small enterprises (1-99 employees), AMI Partners put Apple’s desktop and laptop market share as 12% and 8%, respectively.

For the quarter ending in September, Apple reported $7.9 billion in revenues and $1.14 billion in net profit. Ostensibly, that is under half of Microsoft’s revenues, which are above $16 billion per quarter, but the Apple numbers exclude most of its iPhone business, which is hardly visible because of GAAP rules subscription accounting. If you remove the impact of that, then Apple’s quarterly revenues were $11.68 billion in revenue and $2.44 billion in net profits. And btw, it’s sitting on a cash pile of $24.5 billion.