I don't totally disagree, but I think this is excessively sunny.
As somebody who was an early NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) and helped start one of the NeXT User Groups, I don't think I would call NeXT a successful company. It created some great technology for its day, but it was an ongoing commercial failure. Nobody would buy the hardware, so they killed that early. By the end they were killing off the OS and going in the direction of being a set of Windows development tools.
It was only that Apple wanted Jobs that saved them, that and Steve's enormous ego, which demanded he bring NeXT along. At the time, Apple could have bought Be and I expect it would have gone as well or better. Remember, it took them 3 years to get a new OS out the door, which is a long time in market-land. And really, the NeXT stuff didn't make a giant difference; it wasn't until the iPod that Apple really took off.
It's worth noting that Steve Jobs's major skill, aside from yelling at people until they designed something that he liked, was marketing. Jobs was incredibly good at selling himself. When weighing his "genius", I think it's worth looking at the extent to which his public image has been shaped by his own skill in self-promotion, and the fact that his company made something that a lot of people directly use and love.
I agree about the iPod, before that Apple was a sad story. They just rebranded the Diamond PMP for the Napster crowd, which was pretty smart. Nobody knew what an MP3 player was till Napster came along:
Diamond Rio MP3 player - 1998
Napster - 1999
iPod - 2001
After that, everything they made was a minimal white box with rounded corners and the rest is history. LOL.
If I recall correctly, Apple didn't really take off until they released a Windows compatible iPod. That singular decision to leap out of the Apple-only ecosystem is what set the stage for the iPhone and the iPad and all other success thereafter. I wonder what world we would be in if Apple had continued to insist on people switching to OSX hardware before enjoying the benefits of the iPod. I suspect that most of the huge market for Windows users would have turned to the Zune, which the few people who actually own them seemed to like. Image a world where the Zune had won the music player wars.
As somebody who was an early NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) and helped start one of the NeXT User Groups, I don't think I would call NeXT a successful company. It created some great technology for its day, but it was an ongoing commercial failure. Nobody would buy the hardware, so they killed that early. By the end they were killing off the OS and going in the direction of being a set of Windows development tools.
It was only that Apple wanted Jobs that saved them, that and Steve's enormous ego, which demanded he bring NeXT along. At the time, Apple could have bought Be and I expect it would have gone as well or better. Remember, it took them 3 years to get a new OS out the door, which is a long time in market-land. And really, the NeXT stuff didn't make a giant difference; it wasn't until the iPod that Apple really took off.
It's worth noting that Steve Jobs's major skill, aside from yelling at people until they designed something that he liked, was marketing. Jobs was incredibly good at selling himself. When weighing his "genius", I think it's worth looking at the extent to which his public image has been shaped by his own skill in self-promotion, and the fact that his company made something that a lot of people directly use and love.