Byline: Commentary By DANIEL NAHMOD / San Francisco Examiner

Chicago - Microsoft wins. Apple loses. Game over. If America needed a wake-up call about the unbounded power of the Microsoft Corp., this is it.

In recent months, the world watched as Apple's fortunes fell, as its stock, sales, morale and market share all plummeted precipitously.

But this week, Apple Computer entered into a shocking alliance with Microsoft, an agreement that grants various preferences and advantages for Microsoft software on the Macintosh platform - in exchange for the tidy sum of $150 million in nonvoting stock.

The company caught a second wind. But at what cost? Before this deal, there was exactly one company offering an alternative to Microsoft / Intel products, one company offering an honest-to-goodness choice in the most prosperous industry in the late 20th century, assuredly the most profitable and defining industry of the next century.

Now there is none.

From the moment of this announcement, the computer industry became a monopoly. Apple Computer, the last holdout against the juggernaut, waved a white flag. No longer is there a Number 2 in the industry. Every personal computer manufacturer in the world, bar none, now prostrates itself to the Gates corporate machine. Every personal computer, regardless of platform, favors Microsoft software, word processors and spreadsheets, Web browsers.

Apple products will continue to be available. They will have jobs, as it were, and the stockholders will have stock. A Microsoft-Apple is better than no Apple at all. But make no mistake: Apple has never been just a product line or a common stock. It has never been "just" about employees, offices, dealers and rebates. And it isn't just computer geeks and Apple addicts who should be interested.

The essential message conveyed by Apple is that one company should not, must not, control the destiny of the nation and the world in the new computerized age. Apple was one shred of strength, integrity and individuality in a darkening universe.

It isn't that Microsoft products are evil. They aren't. They're packed with features and they're by and large user friendly. They're occasionally affordable. But the products are often bug-ridden, unreliable, difficult to install and difficult to maintain.

Microsoft has bought out or shut down myriad competitors and shrewdly enhanced its monopoly. It has sucked up leading corporations in a wide range of technology subsectors, the goal being integration of these holdings into a unified and grandly profitable Microsoft Planet.

This could be more akin to an Orwellian nightmare than anything we might have imagined even 10 years ago.

The Microsoft control over information, both access and content, is being extended by the hour. Its Internet tools are gaining in prominence, now with Apple's help. Its tentacles extend into TV with enterprises like Web TV and MSNBC, and its software reside on more than 90 per cent of all computers in the world.

Apple's Macintosh was a last bastion of technological independence. Sure, it didn't sell in the tens of millions. Sure, it didn't have the vast array of software available to its Intel-Inside counterparts. But Apple had a unique something, that elegance and polish, that subversive flair, that taste of the uncommon. Allied with Microsoft, that Apple taste has gone sour.

- Daniel Nahmod is a senior programmer and analyst at Baxter Healthcare in Deerfield, Ill.