But Apple is still a consumer-focused personal computer company, and one trend I like to revisit is how Apple continues to grow its presence in business and professional settings.

Here’s a pretty good indicator: If you’re in the business of designing things like machines or buildings, there’s a chance you’re using software from Autodesk. Its latest mechanical design software, called Inventor Fusion, is used by mechanical engineers to design cars and planes and factory assembly lines. It’s heavy-duty software that’s currently available on Windows. A new trial version for the Mac has just recently come out is coming out soon.

While engineering software like this tended to be run on beefed-up Windows workstations during the last decade, the Mac has started to make serious inroads among engineers and designers, especially the younger ones, says Autodesk product manager Kevin Schneider. “The younger generation of engineers has grown up with computing expectations that are completely different,” he says. They used Macs at school, probably learned to edit photos and video in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, so when they start using CAD and other software, naturally, they want it running on a Mac, too.

Autodesk makes four applications available on Apple’s App Store, and the results are pretty stunning. Those applications — Autocad LT, Autocad WS, Motion FX and Sketchbook Pro — have clocked up 2.2 million downloads via the App Store. That’s a lot for any software, and it’s a heck of a lot when you consider that these applications don’t come for free. Sketchbook Pro goes for $59.99; Autocad LT costs $899.99.

The number is even more impressive when you consider that Autodesk apps account for about 2 percent of total downloads on the App Store. Late last year, Apple announced that its store had broken the 100-million-download mark, generating 100,000 downloads a day, and making it the biggest software download site in the world.

It’s just another indication that the Mac is still making inroads against Windows in the workplace. A new Forrester Research survey of 3,350 IT decision makers finds that 46 percent of all firms in North America and Europe issued Macs to their employees in 2011; that figure was up by more than half since 2009.

Now, to be clear, Gartner’s figure doesn’t include the ill-starred TouchPad. But sources familiar with HP’s build plans say the initial TouchPad order came in somewhere between 1.8 million and two million units. So, even if HP had sold every TouchPad it built, it wouldn’t have matched Apple.

Reporting first-quarter earnings after the bell on Tuesday, Apple rolled out the big numbers once again, its strong financials fueled by record iPhone and iPad sales.

The company posted a profit of $13.06 billion on revenue of $46 billion. Earnings per share were $13.87, far more than the $10.08 per share analysts had been expecting.

Apple said it sold 37.04 million iPhones for the quarter, up more than 128 percent from the year prior; 15.43 million iPads, up 111 percent (so much for the Kindle Fire …); 5.2 million Macs, up 26 percent; and nearly 15.4 million iPods, down 21 percent. Big numbers — all of them. And all but one trounced estimates.

Analysts had expected Apple to report first-quarter earnings of $10.08 a share on revenue of about $38.8 billion. And, on average, they had called for iPhone shipments of nearly 30 million, iPad shipments of about 14 million and Mac shipments of around five million.

“We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs,” Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. “Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline.”

Apple’s guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, as per usual, is comically low: Expected revenue of $32.5 billion and earnings per diluted share of $8.50.

Apple shares, which had slipped more than 1.6 percent to $420.31 in advance of the company’s earnings announcement, are now headed back upward in after-hours trading.

NOTES FROM THE EARNINGS CALL

• Quick observations before the call: Apple now has $97 billion in cash, short- and long-term securities on hand. Apple’s profits exceeded Google’s entire revenue — $10.6 billion.
• Q1 2012 brought with it all-time highs for quarterly iPhone, iPad and Mac sales.
• Customers have downloaded more than 100 million apps from the Mac App Store in its first year.
• iPod still claims more than a 70 percent share of the MP3 market.
• The iTunes store generated $1.7 billion in revenue. $120 million in apps and music sold on Dec. 25 alone.
• Strong iPhone growth across segments driven by iPhone 4S. Siri has “captivated consumers.”
• Almost all of the Fortune 500 support the iPhone. Many are developing mission critical iPhone apps.
• iPad is popular …
• … with all segments of the market. Unprecedented adoption in Fortune 500 and education.
• More than 600,000 copies of iBooks Author have been downloaded so far.
• 85 million iCloud customers so far.
• By the end of this month, developers will have earned $4 billion cumulatively from App Store sales.
• $6.1 billion in revenue from Apple retail stores. Each store generated an average of $17.1 million in revenue last quarter. That’s an increase of 43 percent from the year prior.
• “We are actively discussing uses of our cash balance. But we have nothing to announce at this time. … We’re not letting it burn a hole in our pocket.”
• Tim Cook: “The reception for the iPhone 4S has been breathtaking. … We made a very bold bet on demand, and it turns out we were short on supply throughout the quarter. … Actually, we ended it with a significant backlog. We’re still short in key geographies.”
• Cook: “I think we made the right decision to go with a broad range of iPhones.”
• Demand for the iPhone in China is “staggering.” Even though Apple is only selling through its Web site and retail partners, “demand is off the charts.”
• Flooding in Thailand has forced Apple to pay more for hard drives. There wasn’t a material supply or cost impact on any product lines in the December quarter, but there will likely be a cost increase in March.
• Cook: We’re really happy with the 15.4 million iPads we were able to sell. This is consistent with our long-term belief that this is a huge opportunity for Apple over time. And, as I’ve said before, there will come a day that the tablet market is larger than the PC market. IDC’s recent data shows that tablet sales exceeded desktop PC sales in the U.S. There is significant momentum in this space.
• In terms of competitiveness, the iPad ecosystem is in a class by itself. We now have 70,000 apps. … I think people really want to do multiple things with their tablets, so we don’t see these limited-function tablets and e-readers as being in the same category as iPad. We don’t think people who want an iPad will settle for a limited-function device.
• Peter Oppenheimer on Apple’s $97 billion in cash, and what the company might do with it: “We know it’s growing. We’re talking about it. … When we have something to announce, we’ll announce it.” He really doesn’t want to answer questions about this.
• Cook on Apple TV and a possible Apple Television: Apple TV is doing extremely well; we just sold a record 104 million units. But we still classify this area as a hobby. We think it’s a fantastic product, and we continue to pull strings and see where we can take it.
• Another question about that $97 billion. Did I mention that Oppenheimer really doesn’t want to answer questions about Apple’s cash?
• Cook: We’re thrilled with iCloud. The response from our customers has been incredible. We’ve signed up 80 million customers in three months. It’s not a product, it’s a strategy for the next decade.
• Nothing much to say about adding more iPhone carriers in China. Cook: “It’s an important market, and we continue to look at how to grow it further.”
• Question about Anobit acquisition, but Oppenheimer dodges.
• Cook on the iPhone in India and Russia: We’re selling in Russia through reseller and carrier partners, and we’re doing the same thing in India. … The next country on our list is Brazil — there’s a huge opportunity there. But I don’t envision Apple Retail going there in the near term.
• Cook: When I looked at the data, particularly in the U.S., after Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, there wasn’t an obvious effect, plus or minus.
• Cook: “There is cannibalization of the Mac by iPad, but there’s much more cannibalization of the PC. We love that trend. The iPad is beginning to appear everywhere. Enterprise has adopted it, education … we sold twice as many iPads into education as we did Macs. … It’s remarkable; we’ve sold 55 million iPads and we’ve only been in the business since April of 2010.”
• Cook on Android versus iPhone: I wouldn’t compare it to Mac and Windows. The Mac has outgrown the market 20 quarters in a row, but still has single-digit market share. We’ve sold over 315 million iOS devices, and over 62 million were sold in the last quarter alone. I don’t have comparable numbers for Android, as I haven’t found a way to get very crisp quarterly reporting for Android like we do, that is transparent and reliable. … Nielsen shows iPhone at 45 percent and Android at 47; comScore shows iPhone at 42 and Android at 41. It’s a very close race.
• I wouldn’t say this is a two-horse race. There’s a horse in Redmond that always suits up and runs. There are always other players. We’ll just want to focus on making great products. We ignore the number of horses on the track — we just want to be the one in the lead.

In other words, it’s going to be a blowout.

And for a number of reasons. Foremost, this is the first quarter to include the new iPhone 4S, which went on sale last October. Apple sold one million of them in the device’s first day at market, and some analysts estimate that, together with the iPhone 4 and 3GS, the company sold upward of 30 million iPhones during the quarter.

Another thing: When Apple last reported earnings, CEO Tim Cook said he was “confident we will set an all-time record for iPhones this quarter.”

So there’s that, too.

Add to it a particularly strong holiday quarter product lineup — iPhone 4S, iPad 2, MacBook Air — and it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Apple doesn’t trounce expectations. Certainly, the company would seem to have all the makings of a beat — a big one, too.

So expect some big numbers from Apple after market close today, and perhaps even another one of those ebullient “best quarter ever” pronouncements.

Wall Street currently expects Apple to report first-quarter earnings of $10.08 a share on revenue of about $38.8 billion. And analysts, on average, are calling for iPhone shipments of nearly 30 million, iPad shipments of about 14 million and Mac shipments of around five million.

This week, I took a fresh look at this and several other gems from my family history with help from a company that has led the charge in online genealogy for 15 years: Ancestry.com. Thanks to mobile apps, other users and a new ability to synchronize content between the Web and desktop software, Ancestry has grown into a robust tool.

The World War I draft card for the author’s great grandfather.

Since I last tested Ancestry in 2006, the company has revamped its desktop software program, Family Tree Maker, so the program can synchronize with Web-based data on Ancestry.com. It’s now available as a mobile app for the iPhone, iPad and Android phones. And the site holds over eight billion records, including content from a partnership with the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The addition of mobile apps plus the syncing feature make Ancestry.com more useful and will bring me back to the site more often. I found several new things on Ancestry this time around, including more census data, ship manifests for two cruises an aunt took, and more suggested family-tree data from other users.

I tested Ancestry.com, its iPhone and iPad apps and the Family Tree Maker desktop software on a Mac. I found a computer to be the best tool for inputting family information like names, birth dates, death dates and locations using Ancestry.com and the Family Tree Maker software. The iPad app was the most enjoyable way of exploring my family-tree records. The site’s pricing can be confusing given the various membership and access levels.

A simple right-to-left swipe on the iPad screen shifted my view of the tree from one branch to the next. In four swipes, I dove back in time to read about my mother’s father’s mother’s mother, Florence Antonia Ford, and her family in the 1910 Census record. Using the iPad on my lap, related records from Ancestry felt more personal than seeing them on a computer. A pinch-to-zoom gesture let me clearly read names and details in each record. (Records can be magnified on a computer screen as well, which is helpful when studying small cursive writing or type, like a 1935 passenger list for a cruise to Bermuda that included my Great Aunt Romayne’s name.)

I was delighted to find data I entered on Ancestry.com six years ago was still in my account, which saved me the trouble of inputting everything again. A new feature called TreeSync let me synchronize all of my family-tree information over to my Family Tree Maker desktop software, and vice versa. After using the Ancestry app on my iPad and adding records to my family tree, I easily synced that data with my desktop software by clicking a top-right button when I next opened the Family Tree Maker.

Users who have spent years on Family Tree Maker software, which has been around for 23 years, will be able to sync data from their PCs to the Web version of their family trees. They can now opt to make their trees public for all Ancestry users to access, thus growing the online database.

I found the desktop software to be more heavy-duty than the website and mobile apps, but its interface is a bit antiquated in comparison.

Winston Churchill’s family tree seen via Ancestry.com’s app on the iPad.

Whenever Ancestry.com has a “hint” to show you about a name you entered on your tree, a green leaf appears beside that name. Selecting that leaf lets you see anything in the Ancestry database that may be associated with that name. These could include paper records scanned in by Ancestry.com or content entered by other people. You can view these hints and, if applicable, merge that data with your own after viewing a side-by-side comparison of your information and the new information.

You can share your findings with friends via Facebook, Twitter or email. When I saw my grandfather’s signature on his World War I draft card, I clicked one button and shared this digitized memento from 1917 with friends and family on Facebook. Content shared from Ancestry.com can be seen by other people, even if they don’t have an account, for up to 14 days. You also can keep everything private.

I know quite a bit about my family history, thanks to work my grandfather did years ago, and this helped me with entering names and knowing which hints were relevant or not. For example, an Ancestry-suggested hint that a record for Florence Ladley was for Florence Antonia Ford in my tree wasn’t accurate. I made the most progress when I called my parents for more names and dates.

Ancestry.com offers a free 14-day trial, after which fees range from $13 to $35 a month, depending on six-month or monthly memberships and whether a person is paying for U.S. Discovery (all records in the U.S.) or World Explorer (unlimited access, including records from other countries) access. The Family Tree Maker software, which starts at around $32, can be downloaded to Macs or Windows PCs or bought in stores. Combined pricing for the desktop software and access to the website starts around $40.

Email katie.boehret@wsj.com.

The company is expected to sell $10 billion worth of iPads and $9 billion of Macs to business customers in 2012, according to Forrester’s latest Global Tech Market Outlook. Those are 68 percent and 45 percent increases, respectively, over 2011.

And in 2013, spending on iPads and Macs could hit $16 billion and $12 billion respectively. Slowly but surely, Apple is making inroads into enterprise, a sector traditionally dominated by Microsoft. And, as Forrester notes, that is somewhat unexpected.

“The biggest disruptive force in the computer equipment market thus is … Apple,” the research outfit says in its report. “This is a surprise, because Apple has not and does not directly address the corporate market, while turning a wide variety of consumer technology markets upside-down. But its rapid growth in the corporate market has been the big surprise of 2011, and it will be even more of a factor in 2012.”

How can that be, when we so rarely hear stories about big enterprise deployments of Apple hardware? As Forrester explains, “The Apple assault on the corporate market has so far taken place without much formal Apple support, and probably without Apple itself understanding its full extent. That’s because corporate adoption of Apple products has been largely clandestine.”

Clandestine? If Apple’s not aggressively pushing its hardware into the enterprise market, how is it getting there?

Carried in by the rank and file. Employees are buying iPhones and iPads, and sometimes even MacBooks, as well. And enterprise is increasingly supporting them on the back end. Sometimes, it’s even subsidizing them or their use. This is the “consumerization of IT” we’re hearing so much about these days, and clearly it’s working very much in Apple’s favor.

I am in need of a new computer. I currently run Windows XP. When is Windows 8 due and should I wait for it? Should I just buy a new computer now with Windows 7 and upgrade to 8 when it arrives?

A:

Windows 8 will likely be released in test, or beta, form, early in the year, and then in final form by the 2012 holiday shopping season. Whether you should wait depends on how badly you need a new PC. One thing to bear in mind if you do buy now is that while Windows 8 will work fine with a keyboard and mouse, its slick new user interface is designed for a touch screen.

Q:

What is the difference between the AMD and the Intel microprocessor chips?

A:

They are different designs from different companies, though Intel is the dominant brand by far. In broad strokes, Advanced Micro Devices’ chips have often claimed better graphics performance and have generally been less expensive. But most computer makers choose Intel, which has lately focused intensely on better battery life without compromising performance.

For average consumers, the most important factor is that Windows runs fine on both, and a typical user doing typical, low-stress tasks might find it hard to distinguish between roughly comparable chips made by the two companies. So, if you are on a budget and an AMD-based machine you like costs less, you are safe to go with it.

Q:

I read your article about using Boot Camp to run Windows on a Mac and it was extremely informative. But I did not understand how to create the drivers needed to make Windows recognize the particular features of the Mac hardware.

A:

Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant program, which is used to set up the Windows installation on a Mac, includes a step in which you download and store the drivers on either a CD or DVD, or an external USB drive. This is software Windows needs to properly operate the Mac’s keyboard, mouse, trackpad and camera.

If you just follow the steps in the Assistant software, you should be able to download and install these drivers, which Apple calls Windows Support Software. It’s a good idea to print the Boot Camp installation guide before you start, an option that appears on the first screen of the Assistant program.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

An expected software update on a slow day at the end of December is hardly big breaking news. But for start-up company Boxee, it signals a shift away from its software for PC browsers and a focus on Internet-connected TVs: The company says version 1.5 of the software will be its last Boxee update for PCs, Ubuntu and Mac computers.

It will be launched along with a Live TV dongle for the Boxee Box later in January.

Version 1.5 of the downloadable software on the Web will include better file support, a new onscreen display, search functionality, HTML5 WebKit-based browser, and will support multiple languages. It will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit), Mac OS X 10.6 and higher, Linux Ubuntu 11.10, and will be available on Boxee.tv through the end of January.

And for those who would rather develop their own software for Boxee: The company is also releasing an open source version of its software.

The update won’t, however, offer PC users access to the same apps that are available on the Box, such as Netflix, Pandora and VUDU.

Boxee first launched in January 2010 as a Web application for watching Internet video online. In November 2010, it launched its awaited Boxee Box device, which came with a nifty Qwerty-style remote and offered a variety of apps — but it launched amid a growing market of Internet-connected TV boxes, including Apple TV, Google TV, Microsoft’s Xbox and the competitively-priced Roku box. At the time of the Boxee’s hardware launch, about 1.5 million people were using the Boxee software.

Boxee explained its shift away from Web software by saying it believes the future of TV will be driven by Internet-connected boxes, connected TVs and second screen devices like tablets. “While there are still many users who have computers connected to their TVs, we believe this use case is likely to decline as users find better alternatives,” Boxee wrote.

The company also said that the lack of premium apps on the downloadable version of Boxee was due to extensive DRM and certification requirements.

Motive

As the saying goes, people are motivated by either greed or fear. I think for many big companies, it’s more the latter. And Microsoft has a lot to be scared about.

If you poke behind its $71 billion in revenue and 39 percent operating margins, 30 percent of the goldmine comes from multiyear volume licensing agreements, which Microsoft calls Enterprise Agreements (EAs). According to industry analyst firm Forrester Research, “these profitable agreements bring in the kind of regular revenue preferred by financial-market analysts that monitor Microsoft’s performance.”

What motivates a customer to sign up for an Enterprise Agreement instead of simply buying Microsoft products, like Office, off the shelf? Well, historically, Microsoft pitched EAs as a way to ensure you can cover your workforce with Microsoft products at a discounted price level.

With companies investing in post-PC devices like smartphones and tablets, and evaluating alternatives to Microsoft productivity solutions, such as Google Apps or Salesforce.com, CIOs are starting to wonder whether renewing their EA is still a top priority.

In response to this threat, Microsoft is now pushing its Software Assurance (SA) licensing model, which allows customers to upgrade to newer products and also use its cloud services. The reason for the possible shift, Forrester says, is that “the twin revolutions of client mobility and cloud servers will kill device-based licensing, which is Microsoft’s existing model.”

So if Microsoft doesn’t embrace the cloud in a big way, the EA gravy train could come to an end.

Means

Apple is cool. Facebook is friendly. And Google isn’t evil. Yet look across a sea of computers in a typical company, and you’ll still see Microsoft everywhere.

And I’m not just talking about Windows. Microsoft has two key assets that will help it win the enterprise cloud:

• Office: While the Web and Web-based apps are fabulous for consuming content and even collaborating around it, Microsoft Office is still the standard in productivity to create corporate content. Love or hate those PowerPoint presentations, but they are still how most companies run. And for flexible analysis, Excel is unmatched. Heck, the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft (which is primarily Office for Mac) is a $350 million business on its own.
• Outlook/Exchange: For many workers, Microsoft Outlook (with Microsoft Exchange Server on the backend) is the first thing they boot up to start their workday, and the program they remain in all day long. According to industry analyst firm Radicati, 301 million corporate mailboxes used Outlook in 2010. Indeed, some companies have switched from Microsoft Outlook/Exchange to Google Apps and back, because users are too addicted to the interface and functionality of Microsoft Outlook.

So Microsoft still owns two of the key ways “knowledge workers” work with knowledge.

Opportunity

Microsoft isn’t working from a standing start. It actually jumped into the cloud relatively early in 2008 with its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), a hosted platform for collaboration. While BPOS suffered from many challenges, mainly because it was based on a platform that wasn’t designed for the cloud, Microsoft made it clear several years ago that they are “all in” as a company in the cloud.

This year, after many delays and much anticipation, Microsoft finally announced its first platform built for the cloud, Office 365. The new version of Exchange is finally on par with its on-premise alternative. Microsoft SharePoint Online is now flexible enough to meet many enterprise use cases. And Microsoft Lync Online, a real-time chat and videoconferencing system, could be a game changer for company productivity.

In parallel, Microsoft is working away on Windows 8, its big bet on the tablet revolution. With all of Microsoft’s failed past attempts at mobility and tablets, some level of cynicism is expected. But some believe Microsoft’s conviction is real. If Microsoft even gets it 80 percent right on tablets, they will likely win in enterprises that are used to the manageability of Windows, and will be attracted to the inevitably deeper Office integration.

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong: The innovation in the cloud is coming from all over, mainly from start-ups. For many of these start-ups and other non-enterprise organizations, a non-Microsoft approach will likely be the winner. But for the millions of you working in corporate America, Microsoft is probably the one bringing the cloud to a desktop near you.

Nick Mehta is CEO of LiveOffice and has served in senior operating roles in the enterprise and consumer technology markets for much of his career. He spent more than five years at Symantec Corporation and Veritas Software Corporation (now Symantec), where he served as vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Vault information archiving and discovery software business.

Apple isn’t commenting and is officially treating all this as rumor and speculation (it rarely comments on acquisitions, anyway). But the deal is being reported in Israeli newspapers, and the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted a welcome message to Apple today, which sure feels like confirmation. So I’ll proceed under the assumption that the reports of this acquisition are true.

Welcome to Israel, Apple Inc. on your 1st acquisition here. I’m certain that you’ll benefit from the fruit of the Israeli knowledge.

December 20, 2011 2:55 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@IsraeliPM

The PM of Israel

That makes this a cause for celebration. With the Anobit buy, Apple is now the latest member of the Flash Madness Club, which I created over the summer, in the wake of the Fusion-io IPO and other activities by notable flash-technology companies like Violin Memory, Pure Storage and Qwilt.

So why is Apple willing to throw down a reported half-billion dollars on this company? It’s because flash memory has a fundamental problem: As it ages, its ability to store data wears off. This problem is sometimes compared to the semiconductor equivalent of Alzheimer’s. Individual cells on the flash-memory chip lose their ability to store the individual ones and zeros that make up the pictures and music and other data they may be storing, especially after millions of read-and-write operations — the act of putting data on the chip and then loading it from the chip for use. After a lot of heavy use — this can vary depending on the chip — the chips begin to suffer problems with “endurance.”

As flash starts to show up in data centers and PCs and other places beyond consumer gear like iPhones and iPads, this becomes a more important problem. If your iPad gets old enough to suffer data-endurance problems, it’s a pretty simple matter to replace it. But in the more rigorous world of an enterprise data center, where millions of reads and writes will be done on a chip daily, data endurance is a potentially very expensive problem. In the enterprise, a solid-state drive is considered suitable only if it can stand up to five full-drive write cycles, where the drive is filled to capacity and then erased every day for five years.

Anobit’s solution to these problems involves techniques known as memory-signal processing and the use of some secret-sauce memory-processing error-correction algorithms, plus some management tricks for moving data around a flash chip in more efficient ways, in order to make them last longer.

It’s also the sort of problem that a company like Apple — which is the world’s largest consumer of flash memory, and has been for several years — would want to solve. Think of the many places where Apple uses flash — the iPad, iPhone, iPod, MacBook Air and Apple TV. And those are just the products we know about, so far. Flash can’t help but appear in many more products.

On top of that, flash technology plays a significant role in Apple’s data centers. Fusion-io, the company that builds flash-based insert cards that speed up garden-variety servers, has named Apple as a significant customer, so there’s plenty of flash inside Apple’s facilities in North Carolina. Flash endurance can’t help but be a problem Apple might face with its iCloud service, for example.

Israel has a big connection to the flash industry. SanDisk’s founder, Eli Harari, is Israeli; a few years back SanDisk acquired an Israeli company called Msystems, which, if my memory serves, was the first to popularize what we now call a thumb or keychain drive. So, historically, there have been a lot of useful innovations on flash memory that have come out of that country. Supposedly, the deal calls for Apple to open a research center there, so it will get the benefit of ongoing innovations on flash. Chances are it’s going to need a few.