During the keynote address introducing the New iPad, Apple announced that they sold 15.4 million iPads in the fourth quarter of 2011. Certainly, that’s a lot of iPads, but the more significant revelation is that Apple sold more iPads than HP sold PCs in that quarter. Compared to HP’s 15.1 million PCs, Apple’s 15.4 iPads meant that Apple outsold the world’s largest PC vendor during the holiday 2011 season. As more experts begin to acknowledge that the iPad is for all practical purposes a “PC”, this is a very significant development.

Of course, HP responded to Apple’s claim by saying, predictably, that traditional PCs aren’t dead and that a lot of people and companies still rely on them. Way to be stuck in the past, HP. But then they also stated that “… if you’re sending Junior off to college, the first computing product needed for homework is a PC.” Really? What exactly do you mean by that HP? Are college students actually required to purchase PCs? Or have they been increasingly choosing Apple’s Macintosh over the last 5 – 10 years? And could it just be possible that students are discovering that they can actually do most of their homework on an iPad? This isn’t even considering that in a year or two, students could be reading all of their textbooks from their iPads.

But seriously, what else would you expect to hear from a company that killed their tablet product and has nothing to sell but traditional PCs? HP’s former CEO specifically said that the “tablet effect is real“. Now there are some hard numbers to back that up. The Old World of Technology is ending right before our very eyes. If you haven’t already noticed, perhaps this is your wake-up call?

The now-famous open letter to RIM executives references a quote that one of RIM’s CEOs recently made in regards to RIM’s so-far-not-yet-successful technology transition, “No other technology company other than Apple has successfully transitioned their platform. It’s almost never done, and it’s way harder than you realize. This transition is where tech companies go to die.”

In fact, Apple has done it by my count, 4 times (Apple II to Macintosh, Motorola 68000 processors to PowerPC processors, Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, PowerPC processors to Intel processors). And now it is possible to argue that Apple is doing it for a 5th time, transitioning from Mac OS to iOS. How does a company like Apple manage to pull off these transitions, during both good times and bad? It stems from their deeply held beliefs that technology must be user-focused. Great technology is born from this and it requires great technology (along with proper execution) to pull off major technology transitions.

As RIM’s CEO said, most companies that try it fail. It’s an incredibly risky time, as RIM is experiencing right now. Poorly executed transitions are opportunities for customers to jump ship. It’s why Microsoft has never done it. They know their continued success is contingent on the inertia that the Windows platform has built up in the industry. But more importantly, Microsoft realizes that this inertia is maintained by all the software that runs on Windows. In order for Microsoft to develop a truly next-generation operating system, they must give up the shaky foundations that Windows is built up. But they know that if they do this, they cut the ties that binds users to Microsoft, as software that runs on Windows would likely need to be modified or completely re-written to run on a next generation of Windows. Only an exceptionally executed transition across all phases would ensure that Microsoft keeps most of their customers. There’s not yet been a need for Microsoft to take that chance. But it is becoming increasingly clear that standing still is also becoming risky. At some point Microsoft, and many other tech companies, will realize that they must make a transition to survive. And that’s when things will become very interesting.

If one pays attention to the market, it is coming into focus that Microsoft is entering (or already has entered) a transitional state. As I alluded to before, the “PC” market is transitioning into mobile devices such as tablets (i.e. the iPad) and smartphones (i.e. the iPhone). Microsoft’s announcements of Windows 8 and their attempts at re-creating their mobile strategy with Windows Phone 7 is evidence that Microsoft has realized the changing state of the market. But a lot hinges on what Microsoft does over the next two years. If Microsoft doesn’t pull off this transition well, the entire future of the company is in doubt. If one doesn’t believe that a company like Microsoft could fall, just a little study of history can show what happened to tech giants like IBM.