There seemed to be the faint possibility last week that the unspeakably tedious platform war that has raged for the past couple of decades between staunchly partisan PC and Macintosh users could finally be allowed to draw to a close. This glimmer of hope was sparked by Apple’s announcement that a version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system can now officially be run on their new range of Macs. In business terms, it’s a case of trebles all round; Microsoft now see the day when all the world’s computers can run Windows, and Apple will be delighted that their machines will be able to run the world’s most widely-used software alongside their own highly-regarded system.

But while corks were popping in the boardroom, eyes were popping on the internet. Allegiances were resworn by many blinkered Mac obsessives, as they slammed the news as the latest in a long line of grim betrayals. Others hailed it as the most thrilling development since sliced premium-grade multi-seed granary bread – and geeky code-monkeys were among the most exhilerated; for them, the idea of a gadget running software it’s not supposed to run has long been a source of fascination. Fired up by such past triumphs as getting an encyclopaedia installed on an iPod, or arcade games working on a digital camera, many have been battling for weeks to get Windows running on a Mac – indeed, one website offered a prize of $13,000 to anyone who could provide proof that they’d managed it. Having paid up to a lucky pair of programmers a few weeks ago, the prize donors probably have the biggest reason to be depressed by Apple’s announcement.

But while the intricacies of the code are debated ad nauseam, the average computer user is simply trying to get on with their work. A fellow writer on this newspaper recently asked me how he might get documents from his Apple-manufactured iBook to open on his imminently-arriving desktop PC; he was relieved to be told that, in many cases, it just works. We’ve moved on from the days when we had to fork out for extra utilities to help us exchange files between Macs and PCs, and as a result the number of people leaping between platforms is pretty small. Occasionally you might yearn to run a program that’s not available for your computer, and that yearning might be strong enough for you to try using a software emulator – but they run so sluggishly that attempting to play a shoot-em-up game inevitably sees you vanquished in cold blood before you turn the first corner. If you find that state of affairs difficult to cope with then you’ll probably have saved up and bought another computer, but the majority of people just want to browse the internet, send email or crop an unpopular family member out of a wedding photo. And as these tasks become faster and more intuitive to perform on all computers, it’s unlikely that the old platform war will spread beyond a very small corner of cyberspace.