Theory I Have about System 7 relating to the success of Apple (in the long run)

I read recently that System 7 was experiencing major crashes and worst of all they were random. At the time, Steve Wozniak pieced together that it was only happening with computers running IE. If you ever opened it it could crash on you at any time. I figured that it probably was eating up RAM.

What I think is a possibility is that Microsoft new it had the only mainstream browser for Mac. The others held a low market share, iCab and Netscape Navigator. Microsoft might have taken that to their advantage by having IE crash the OS by maybe a physical memory dump which they could have controlled if they made their program not quit one process. That process could have crashed the entire computer at any time making it hard to determine that the cause was IE. Anyway, long time users of Mac's said these Macs are bad now and we should go to PC. So, they left Mac when Mac was dominating the market for Personal, Educational and Business computers.

I must say that if Microsoft did that then they are terrible people, at least at the time. However, there are pro's and con's. Microsoft did "steal" thew market share almost causing apple to go out of business. However, Apple thought it was the virus invulnerable, secure and strong OS that was the problem so it caused them to make a new OS. This in turn resulted in OS 8 and OS 9 which originated from NeXTSTEP which was virtually the predecessor to OS X.

In the end, Apple could have gone out of business but since they didn't and their market share is now climbing Microsoft actually did Apple a favor because it helped them form the best OS in the world (Mac OS X).