Umm, sorry, where are you getting "hundreds of millions of units" from?

Official figures are hard to come by but estimates suggest that NeXT sold about 50,000 units over its entire lifetime. The company had to stop manufacturing hardware and was very much dying.

You could classify the deal with Apple as a merger in that both companies were in a certain amount of trouble by that point and needed eachother (or some other merger partner) for survival, but Apple had a lot more runway. They did, after all, hand over $429 million in cash for NeXT, plus some quantity of shares.

It was literally a merger on paper, for what that’s worth. NeXT were also close to an IPO and their dev tools were second to none. WebObjects and EOF were first rate products easily worth hundreds of millions to the right people in their own right.

That distortion field is very powerful, I see. NeXT failed as an enterprise. It was close to going the way of the Lisp Machines.

Oh yeah. I have no doubt they were failing. But those two pieces of tech were very smart for their time.

Yes, I, too, saw that demo from the 80's. But the best tech doesn't always win :)

I don’t think EOF is from the 80s. WebObjects certainly isn’t.