Apparently not . . .
[IP] more on Apple’s Unlikely Guardian Angel:
All long-term Mac users can recall that the primary benefit of switching from OS 9 to OS X is reliability. And this is true — as an expert, I make a point of keeping my systems humming at near-perfection. My OS 9 Macs had to be rebooted every few days after heavy use; my OS X systems can have uptime measured in months. Since I had never seen OS 9 systems run longer, I counted that as near-perfection.
Woz’s question: *why* do OS 9 boxes have a reputation for unreliability? And then he raised this bombshell: on classic Mac OS not running ANY Microsoft software, he routinely saw uptime in months. But install Internet Explorer (shipped with every Mac) or Office (usually the first 3rd-party application to be added), and boom — the system starts regularly crashing. These applications were so pervasive that even Mac experts accepted this as part of the OS — but as soon as he raised the point, I recalled that my Mac mail, web, and database servers routinely had multimonth uptimes. I had just attributed that to a lack of a user at the console. Which then makes one wonder — it’s awfully interesting that these crashes happened in ways that were never attributed to MS, only to the OS. It’s equally interesting to consider that Apple may have been building systems with the same rock-solid reliability they have today for the better part of their history. And that their supposed savior may be the reason why Macs were dragged down to their level for most of that time.
I have to wonder about this: if you read the whole thing, the author posits what might have happened if MSFT had stopped shipping Office for the Mac (not much, he claims) and how MSFT’s “support” might not have been that big a deal. MSFT apps as equal-opportunity system destabilizers/crashers?