Microsoft is today 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 this morning at the VMware Cloud Foundry announcement (which was very interesting open source Platform-As-A-Service introduction, more Thursday when I get a video up). 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 this 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:

There is a lot happening on the iPad. One of the coolest new things is called “AirPlay.” What does it do? It lets you push video to your Apple TV with the click of a button.

Today Squrl brings Hulu, YouTube and Netflix (amongst others) to the AirPlay table. This is very significant. My video watching behavior has changed more in the past month since getting Squrl and another iPad app that’s coming tomorrow than it has since I first got a Tivo years ago.

More on this tomorrow, but there’s something very significant going on here, don’t miss it. Here’s a video first look at Squrl, reprinted from Rackspace’s Building43 site:

Video, it seems, is everywhere. From Hulu to Netflix to YouTube to Vimeo, keeping track of it all can be a daunting task. Squrl is solving that problem with innovative ways to capture and curate video from the Internet.

“There are a lot of different video choices and a lot of different video apps,” explains Mark Gray, CEO and Co-Founder of Squrl. “We believe that users want to centralize that and want to manage that better. So with the plethora of video that’s now available…and more and more content starting to go a la carte, people need a better way to manage that and manage across all those different video experiences.”

Squrl allows you to aggregate and organize videos in one location. You can bookmark videos you find while browsing the web on your iPad, Mac or PC. You can capture any video that you tweet or retweet. And you can forward video links via email to your email address that Squrl provides, and the system will add the videos to your collection.

Discovery is also a big part of the service, as you can find new videos in several different ways. First, you can search the curated content that’s already within Squrl. “We believe that this next evolution of video is about people that are watching videos starting to curate that content into meaningful collections,” says Gray. “We allow you to search that.” The second way is to search any given web site, such as Netflix. Finally, you can subscribe to someone else’s content and receive push notifications when videos have been added to their collections.

“What we’re hoping to do with Squrl,” explains Gray, “is make [managing video] fun and easy as opposed to what it is today.”

More info:

Squrl web site: http://www.squrl.com/
Squrl on Twitter: http://twitter.com/squrl