[valuearb]

NeXt made money for its iriginal investors and provided the OS for every iPhone and iPad ever made.

Hardly a failure, let alone a spectacular one.

Pixar was a tiny struggling business spun out of Lucasfilm and sold to Jobs any employees.

[ThomPete]

And because Jobs had the right connections he could help Pixar. Next wouldn't have made it on it's own.

[valuearb]

NeXt had gotten out of hardware to massively cut it's costs (and resized it's workforce). It had a good customer base for it's software. It likely would have continued on for a long while. I believe they would have repriced WebObjects and continued to enhance it and NextOS and grow their customer base.

Pixar was a software company when he purchased control. What turned them around was their switch to making feature films. I'm pretty sure that they would have gotten distribution from anyone once Toy Story was far enough along, the question is whether they could have financed the effort. Having Steve Jobs helped a lot because he believed in them and people would return his calls.

Let me put it another way. There is a whole army of successful technology CEOs who could have run NeXt or Pixar into the ground. The fact that both became huge successes wasn't just luck, Steve Jobs played a huge role in both.

Apple was going to switch to Windows NT or buy BeOS before Jobs convinced them that NextStep was the better option. He connived Disney to partner with Pixar. Could Steve Ballmer have done that?

[ThomPete]

He didn't convince Disney to partner with Pixar he convinced Pixar to partner with Disney as Disney we struggling not Pixar. Creativity Inc goes through the details of how those things got about.

And no Next wouldn't have made it by any stretch it was only because Jobs forced them into Apple that they survived. The world belonged to windows at that point and Next had no chance to actually do anything with that.