We’ve all heard the PC vs Mac question many times. And have groaned at the thousands of threads titled ‘Which is Better: Mac or PC?’ How many human hours have been wasted over this non-question?

This little cartoon may seem innocuous, but it’s a harbinger of things to come. The people in the know realize that the operating system, at least for 95% of the computer users in the world, already has moved to the web. The people who we are trying to reach are on the Internet, not sitting at a workstation using a desktop app.

And when we reach these users they will not be using a PC or a Mac. They’ll be on a mobile device, or a netbook running Linux or some other free or alternate operating system. The buyers we are trying to reach are not the sophisticated West Coast graphic designers on their Macs or the corporate programmers pushing out code on their PCs.

With the new HTML5 specification now being included in all modern browsers, WebApps are the new future of computing. It is easy to predict that 10 years from now the Mac vs PC question will be looked back on as an example of how good marketing by Apple created a climate of cultism in their users usually only seen in political, racial, or nationalism type movements.

This cult of ownership that makes an Apple user somehow superior to someone who uses a PC will fade fast. Searching Google on the Web, or watching a YouTube video, is not any more of an exalted experience if you do it on a Mac rather than a PC. The current economic climate will play it’s part in this as well. People caught by the downturn in the economy will not pay the premium price to buy a new Mac or iPhone when there are so many lesser cost alternatives available.

In the past we wanted to write apps that both PC and Mac users could run. Then we found that the actual percentage of Mac users is so small that it didn’t pay to spend the extra time developing for the Apple platform. (Witness the proliferation of very useable programs for the Mac that allow it to run PC apps. It just was not cost effective to maintain code for both platforms.)

Then hybrid platforms appeared, such as Adobe Air, which allowed a person to code an app once and have it run on both a Mac and PC. If you have ever had the misery of needing to use a program written in Air you have my sympathies. Even though it is extremely slow, extremely buggy and a pain to use, it is the best cross platform system that is available if you want to run the same app on either a PC or a Mac.

None of these solutions or platforms are viable and there will be no better alternative forthcoming. No company is going to invest the time and effort to create a cross platform desktop solution when it is so obvious that the future will be Web based applications where the question of what computer is being used doesn’t even enter into the picture.

The HTML5 spec makes it possible to write full blown, fast, efficient applications that run in the browser. This technology is available today. And two years from now as the next incarnation of improvements and additions to the HTML5 spec and the next major version releases of browsers begin to be released we won’t even be looking back at desktop apps.

It won’t be much longer before the answer to the question of ‘Do you have a Mac or a PC?’ will be ‘I don’t know.”