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.

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

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?

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.

Was it? Apple bought NeXT for their OS which eventually became OS X. Copeland was a dismal failure, and that is why Apple bought NeXT. Jobs' became the interim CEO, did the initial iMac, and iPod and the rest is history.

Built on apples sucess not next.

Other folks have pointed out that NeXT had a successful exit and the software lives on, to which I'd add a nice continuing career path for many of its employees (with Apple).

Can I ask what metrics you're judging by?

Those folks are missing the point. Next was bought and brought into apples ecosystem thats were the found sucess none of that was part of any plan. Again luck and timing, ifJjobs hadnt been introduced the chances of Next being incorporated into Apple would be much less likely.

That seems like a high bar for 'success' that I'm not sure many share. Lots of startups people deem successful had exits that weren't originally part of the plan. Luck and timing are huge parts of 'success'.

And many many times more didn't. You can't just look at the succesful ones thats the whole point. Most fail 9 out of 10.

I don't understand what you're arguing. Of course most startups fail. What does that have to do with how people view NeXT?

We are talking about companies who are successful because of their product/services/business. Not companies who get saved from going under by some other company. Next was saved.