How Apple's Now Outflanking Microsoft

But while the focus and attention is pointed toward iPad and iPhone, those two hot products have done something that Apple has had no luck doing for the past 25 years. They have set up the Mac platform for market dominance. If Microsoft didn’t like seeing Apple pass it in market capitalization, it could be in for more agita if it starts to dig into Microsoft’s PC market share.

There are a number of reasons for this to happen, and media buzz isn’t one of them. Apple is doing now what Microsoft did so successfully during the 1980s and early 1990s: It’s attracting developers to its different platforms and locking them in. To develop apps for the iPad or iPhone -- or even to self-publish a book to Apple’s iBookstore -- the Mac OS X operating system is a requirement. For a generation of developers now getting started, being conversant if not fluent in the Mac platform is a way of life -- just like developers found Visual Basic a way of life 10 or 15 years ago.

Developers will go where the money is. And many of them will go where the fast money is. Today, a lot of people will take that to mean writing software for iPhone and iPad platforms -- even if that means accepting Apple’s terms and conditions and lock-ins and even if it means shifting their PC budget from Windows to Mac. And businesses, and the rest of the market, will eventually go where the great apps are.

This might seem laughable right now, given that Microsoft still maintains about 90 percent market share in the worldwide PC operating system space. In the U.S., Apple is up to 8 percent, according to Gartner. Pay close attention, though, to when Apple crosses the 10 percent mark. If that happens or gets close before the year is out, it will be an indication that the red-hot sales of iPads and iPhone 4s will be pulling Mac sales in a meaningful way. As it stands now, Apple is seeing 33 percent, year-over-year growth in sales of Mac-based PCs, and is selling about a million Macs a month.

Corporate IT has been increasingly risk-averse since the dot-com meltdown. Face it: Many enterprises haven’t upgraded their PC operating systems in almost a decade -- Windows XP launched in August 2001. Since then, Apple and other mobile technology vendors have managed to transfer many PC functions to mobile devices including the wildly popular iPad and iPhone.

We’ve seen more genuine excitement from Apple around its client devices in the past six months than we’ve seen from Microsoft in the past nine years. Many will say that’s not enough to project such success will impact the PC market in the long term. The view from here is that it will. To determine what the correct view is, as it unfolds, keep your eye on the development community. It goes where the money is.

E-MAIL ED MOLTZEN AT [email protected]