At the time NeXT was not in great shape either, IIRC they where contemplating killing their hardware in favor of just providing an alternative OS and where star

At the time NeXT was not in great shape either, IIRC they where contemplating killing their hardware in favor of just providing an alternative OS and where starting to pitch their visual IDE in the market. The consensus at the time is that NeXT would not have made it if not for the acquisition. They where not bankrupt by any means but what little market share they had gained had started to erode. Slightly before this time, at the dawn of the web I had a NeXT box and they where great machines, but they where expensive and outside of early web dev and some scientific stuff they where not heavily used. Sun was eating at their scientific market with the Sun Stations and web dev kind of took off on every platform so the price point became less and less justifiable. My personal opinion is that NeXT would not have survived had Apple not come knocking at their door and would have suffered the same fate as BeOS, though jobs had the resources to drag it out far longer that Be did. It was not his success at NeXT that brought Apple back to the table with hat in hand, but rather it was his success with Pixar. It was a time of consolidation, The Amiga had died, Atari was long out of the game and the Mac OS was aging rapidly hardware was fixed the only two options on the table where PC and Mac everything else had fallen by the wayside and the Mac's operating system was on life support. Copeland had died which was supposed to be the savior OS and as such the Mac, while holding it's own in pure hardware specs given the move to the PPC was not capitalizing on modern hardware or computing due to the OS. Meanwhile the hardware game was set so Steve was having no luck breaking into the market with his own hardware platform. Apple and NeXT needed each other and Apple needed Steve so it was a do or die for both. Apple was on the ropes pretty bad, there stock was $11 a share (god it sucked to be a broke college kid) and Gates shortly after this point would bail them out with a loan to stave off anti-trust allegations for another decade. Had the NeXT / Apple merger not happened both companies would not exist today. Kind of funny to think how close one of the largest companies of the times, almost blinked out of existence.