Interesting.<p>The problem with the NextStep stuff at the time was that it required high-end hardware. Even years later when they started to make cross-platform development tools, they were limited to niche markets where you new your users would pay up for plenty of RAM. That was fine for, e.g., financial trading.<p>So I think they would have had to start basically from scratch, sullying their hands by writing for the sad world of 16-bit Windows 3.1. If they had done it, though, it could have been incredible.<p>On the other hand, they could well have been killed by the same issue that killed Netscape: the web, being definitionally open, doesn&#x27;t provide a lot of defensible advantage to early movers.