Is Windows out and Macintosh in among Silicon Valley's elite?

Microsoft is showing off pieces of the next version of Windows (we're all calling it Windows 8) but I'm wondering if anyone cares anymore about Windows in the tech enthusiast space.

Why do I say that?

Well, at nearly every tech industry event lately I've noticed an almost complete shift away from Windows-based computers. Here, take a look at a panoramic photo I shot [yesterday] morning at the VMware Cloud Foundry announcement. This room had only two PCs that I could see. The entire rest of the room was on Macs or iPads. Keep in mind that in this one room was a mixture of marketers, developers, executives, press folks, and hard-core geeks. I noticed this same ratio at TEDx; at Web 2 Expo; at Stanford University events; at Facebook events; and other places.

Now, you could say "well, Silicon Valley is just weird and they all buy Apple stuff." But, note that VMware is run by many former Microsoft executives (I met Charles Fitzgerald in the hallway, who is one of the smartest strategists I've ever met, and Mark Lucovsky was on stage [yesterday] morning. You can see him at the front of the room in that panoramic photo behind one of the three VMware Macs. He even joked about his former Microsoft role "I developed DLL hell at Microsoft" he said).

But I saw the same shift at LIFT in Geneva, Switzerland and LeWeb in Paris -- and while the World Economic Forum had more PCs in the audience than at VMware, there were a ton of iPads.

Something is going on here, but why isn't it showing up in market share numbers?

Is this the new "tech divide?" Those who are passionate about tech are going to get Macs and everyone else is gonna get a PC because their boss probably bought one for them assuming that if you only do email, Excel, and PowerPoint that there's no need for you to have a Mac?

What does this mean for Windows 8?

When Steve Jobs noted that the iPad is ushering in a "post-PC world" I wonder if he knows something we don't: that early adopters, influencers, geeks, developers and Silicon Valley insiders are going "all Mac, all the time?"

Are you? If you're still excited by Windows, why?

Here's Facebook's team that developed messaging, same kind of "mostly Mac" ratio:

Reprinted with permission.

Robert Scoble is a long-time tech and video blogger who works for Rackspace, where he is part of the building 43 project. He started blogging in 2000 at scobelizer.com; from 2003-2006 he was a high-profile Microsoft evangelist blogger, and he helped start Channel 9. Scoble grew up in Silicon Valley. He is @scobleizer on Twitter.