Next was profitable? Do you have a source for that? They raised hundreds of millions of dollars and sold 50,000 units. In '93, Canon plowed a second investment in to keep them afloat. Even with the new $, they laid off 300 of 540 employees. They couldn't sell their hardware operations and went pure software. I'm not saying they toss out all of the tech, but calling NeXT profitable is just plain false. It was a failed company with great leadership. Certainly there was some technical value in the deal, but much of the $429M paid was for Jobs and the people he had working with him.
Profitable, but underwater. NeXT sold to Apple for half a billion when over a billion in funding had been pumped into it (let alone valuation).
NeXT alone was never going to do what Apple has done. Apple had a sustainable hardware business (after being fixed up a little with sexy designs) that gave them enough manufacturing leverage to do iPod, and iPod gave them enough operations leverage and economy-of-scale to do what they're doing now.
"Care to make a long bet on how much of Loopt tech is still around in 5 years?"
More of it than is around now. Location based apps are just getting started.
I think there is sort of a last mile problem for data, in the same way that there is a last mile problem for hardware. As much people come to see the world this way I think we will end up with more and more possibilities for local social than we can currently even imagine. I think this acquisition will be a good opportunity, as Loopt will effectively be able to use these financial tools as bait to get more people into their system.