IIRC Jobs purchased NeXT when he took the Apple CEO job, to get a new OS base. As NeXT was his company, I'm pretty sure it was a decision based on bias and urgency and not because NextStep was the best there was. But yeah it's an interesting legacy for sure :)

You recall that incorrectly :) The NeXT purchase came first, Jobs as CEO came after that. But yeah, it was a bit of a reverse takeover in a way.

More specifically, Steve Jobs founded NeXT after Apple pushed him out in the late 80s.

A decade or so later, Apple was on the tail end of a long, slow, downward slide. The team wasn't happy with the current state of their Mac operating system, and bought out NeXT to use their software as the basis of its replacement (Mac OS X).

Jobs, as CEO of NeXT, came back to Apple as a consultant, but was CEO again in a matter of years.

NextStep was easily the best there was. Nothing else was remotely suitable. The only contender people like to fantasize about is BeOS, which was nice (I used it as a daily driver for a year), but a toy compared to NextStep and OSX.

> IIRC Jobs purchased NeXT when he took the Apple CEO job

No, Apple bought NeXT after the failure of Copland to birth a replacement for the creaky and leaky MacOS (BeOS was the big alternative, but Apple thought they were asking for too much).

And NeXT proceeded to take over: Apple bought NeXT in February 1997 keeping Jobs back as an advisor, Jobs staged a boardroom coup to remove Amelio in July, and was then named interim CEO.

Following that he started cutting into the existing product lines and placing NeXT people (Tevanian , Forstall), promoting people he was interested in (Ive), or hiring them from outside (Cook). Basically reshaping the company.