The Coffeeshop Index gives the win to Apple

As far as Apple is concerned, Windows Vista appears to be the gift that keeps on giving. Apple snagged an astonishing 14 percent of U.S. computer sales last month, and its sales were up 64 percent from a year earlier. This confirms my own Coffeeshop Index survey and, points to some really, really ugly turf wars in enterprise computing in the near future.

The Coffeeshop Index is my own absolutely unscientific survey of computer ownership. When I go into a Starbucks or a Panera (have you tried the Sierra Turkey on Focaccia? Awesome) or anyplace with free WiFi I look around and count the PCs and Macs. The Coffeeshop Index currently puts Macs at about 20 to 25 percent of the market. But then, I live in a huge college town.

When I try to break computer ownership down by age, it looks like old white guys like me are almost entirely Wintel users, while college kids are maybe closer to 50 percent Mac users – particularly college-age males. (This may be an observer effect. I have more trouble estimating the age of women than I do of men, but it looks to me like even college-age women are more likely to use a PC than a college-age man, while working women almost always seem to be using a company laptop running Windows.)

(Stephen Baker, an analyst for NPD, the company that released the sales figures gave a lot of credit to Apple's retail stores for the company's gains.

(You don't have to visit more than two Apple stores to realize what's going on. It's the sales staffs. The stores are full of kids selling computers to kids. The Apple stores represent the total triumph of viral marketing – which was supposed to be an Internet thing, not a bricks-and-mortar thing. But there it is.)

When you stand with a latte in your hand looking at Mac laptops and all the bright young faces behind them you can practically hear the brand-loyalty engine shifting into overdrive and you can see a coming culture war as today's college students graduate and start to work. Their first day on the new job the IT guy comes around to measure them up for the corporate-standard, Vista-loaded, slightly-underpowered laptop and what do you bet they say, "I'd really rather have a Mac Air. Could I just use mine on the company network?"

Remember, if you're old enough, how PCs got into businesses in the first place. They were smuggled in by the fathers and grandfathers of those kids sitting in Starbucks with their headphones on and their MacBooks open. And history repeats itself.

The next time around it will be different. Thirty years ago the reason an IBM PC and a copy of VisiCalc could supercharge a department head's career was because there wasn't any IT department to tell him no. Now, of course, that's the biggest part of IT's job, saying no.

And Microsoft will be there to back up IT, giving it a thousand reasons to say no and keep the Macs out. But it may already be too late. And the old alliances are fragmenting – Intel makes just as much money on a Mac as it does a PC these days.

Microsoft did a superlative job of starting on the desktop and taking over the server room. It challenged an aging, inflated IBM that was coasting on its mainframe business, and succeeded in redefining the computing architecture. But these days Microsoft looks like the new IBM, and desktop computing is beginning to look as quaint a mainframes. And in my neighborhood, graduation day is coming.