&gt;<i>NeXT, for all its technical merit, was a repeated commercial failure. It failed as hardware, it failed as an OS for other people&#x27;s hardware, and then it failed as developer tools of other people&#x27;s OSes.</i><p>Well, we seem to forget that OS X 10.0 is basically NeXT with a new skin. So it might have failed as an &quot;OS for other people&#x27;s hardware&quot; meaning PCs, but it did phenomenally well with Apple&#x27;s hardware.<p>And even the &quot;failed&quot; NeXT company got sold for a cool half billion, an order of magnitude better than e.g. BeOS ($11 million).<p>And NeXT&#x27;s itself market performance was OK enough to allow it to live and reach several versions all these years up to 1997 until it was bought.