Steve Jobs of Apple doesn’t employ a sales force to persuade corporations to switch to Apple. Nonetheless Apple market share in this area is growing, driven in part by the consumer’s liking for the iPod and iPhone. In an intriguing Business Week survey Peter Burrows highlights that employees, sick of a PC by day, Mac by night existence, are pushing their firms into switching to Apple.

Mark Slaga, chief information officer of Dimension Data , a large computer services firm based in suburban Johannesburg, says he has received 25 e-mails recently from employees who want permission to use Macs at work. So far he has refused, because he doesn’t want to hire people to provide Mac tech support, but “it’ll happen someday,” he concedes. “Steve Jobs doesn’t need a sales force because he already has one: employees like the ones in my company.”

It’s a neat example of word of mouth advocacy in action. It is driven by the consumer, not the salesman and in this case the company (Apple) does not even explicitly support it, preferring to cater for the needs of the consumer and the education market and to concentrate on making the product desirable.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, has again saluted the rise of blogging (myspace), self-produced (youtube) and on-demand (iTunes) media consumption.

“It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy - not just companies but whole countries.”

Last weekend, I was in the in the Apple store in San Francisco. It was hard to get the attention of a sales assistant. There was no particular sale on, but what I saw was a feeding frenzy. People were particularly excited by the video iPod.