The arrival of the MacBookPro was the last straw. Although I was initially cautious about adding yet another OS to the collection, the initial adjustment period is behind me and I now love it. As a result, I am hereby formally abjuring all claims of faithfulness to any one platform. To heck with it, I'm dating them all!!

Let's take one more step down this path. You know what software gets my vote? If you read my last column, this comes as no surprise: The stuff that is just as platform-agnostic as I am.

If it runs on my Mac, on my Windows box, and on my Linux box, you can bet it has my complete loyalty. Of course, in this day and age I don't expect to find many applications as indifferent to their partners as I am, but the list is growing. In addition to simple browser and email programs, I find gems like Apache and MySQL to be faithful companions. I run LAMP on my Linux boxes, WAMP on my Windows boxes and XAMP on my Mac and guess what: it all works.

And now for the evangelical portion of today's program: like me, you should become a platform agnostic. Why? Because it is not just convenient and useful, it's flat-out inevitable.

This trend is not just about operating systems and the related software applications-what's really pushing this trend is the web. A website doesn't care what OS you're running; if you have a browser, you're good-to-go. As more applications are delivered via the web, the only thing that will matter is a sturdy Internet connection. The web will convert one and all to its heretical humanistic approach: by delivering what people want.