IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM...

They'd been dueling for more than a decade, the binary wonders of the computer age: Steve Jobs, the flower-child dreamer whose Apple Computer brought the world the Mac's cheerful desktop icons, and Bill Gates, the brilliant and ruthless competitor whose Microsoft tamed the world with Windows after sneaking in behind those scary columns of DOS code. Their battle for control of the home computer suggested '60s barricades re-erected for the corporate '80s: Yin vs. Yang. Luke vs. Vader. Kennedy vs. Nixon. Jeans vs. Pinstripes. Art vs. Commerce.

And the winner is? We're so conditioned to Hollywood's underdog victories that it came as a shock last week for Commerce to whip Art, hands down and forevermore. The end came at the MacWorld Expo in Boston, with what will surely go down as one of our era's iconic images: Gates' tousle-haired grin looming from a giant video screen over the tiny figure of Apple "adviser" Jobs, who stood on the podium watching his strange bedfellow confirm Microsoft's decision to bail out the seminal Silicon Valley start-up.

The lesson? Art may cast a brighter light in the short term, but Commerce generally wins big in the final tally. The high-tech world had spent the past month wondering which Apple-preserving rabbit Jobs would pull from his hat during his MacWorld speech. Now we know: the plan is to backstab Apple's friends by embracing their mutual enemy in one naked grasp for survival. The era of "competition between Apple and Microsoft is over," Jobs told the stunned conclave, announcing Microsoft's $150 million investment and software promises. They could all just get along.

Then Gates' smug smile blossomed on that vast Orwellian screen (a Stalinesque edifice uncannily resembling the one that got shattered in the famous first Mac ad in 1984), and the Microsoft leader regaled the Apple masses with his boundless affection for the operating system (OS) whose commercial viability he had spent much of his adult life systematically undermining. "We think Apple makes a huge contribution to the computer industry," Gates assured the room, respectfully observing the taboo against speaking ill of the dead--or, ahem, the gravely ailing. Let's put it this way: you sure didn't hear the man extolling the wonders of Apple a few years ago, when the Mac still had market relevance. Gates celebrating Apple today is like the Department of the Interior celebrating the spotted owl by fencing in its nesting grounds and trying not to let the last ones die.

The faithful's reaction to the Gates-Jobs duet was pretty much what anyone conversant with the Apple cult would have expected. "Mass suicide planned tonight in Silicon Valley," read a typical posting to the newsgroup alt.destroy.microsoft. And the MacWorld crowd booed Gates' image even more than Jobs' turncoat words. But there were cheers too. "Everybody was booing Microsoft," says attendee Mark Lilback, 24, "and then they were like, 'Oh, Bill Gates is listening to this,' and they started to applaud." Who could blame them? They knew the truth: they were a conquered kingdom's starving partisans. Booing Gates meant biting the only hand left with the wherewithal to feed them.