There's the business end of things; Ross Perot himself "only" invested $20 million and got just shy of $70 million out of it when it was finally sold.
Total failure. If you squint hard enough with VC eyes, they can almost convince you that $70 million is a terrible amount of money.
And then ask Apple where OS X comes from. Ask any iOS developer about Objective-C (though not invented by NeXT, it certainly helped popularize it). Ask the wider world about object oriented programming.
If you can see past the bottom of the balance sheet and beyond the next quarter, NeXT lives on, despite not achieving commercial success.
Apple paid $429 million in cash, which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares, which went to Steve Jobs, who was deliberately not given cash for his part in the deal.