The short version is most of Apple's management was replaced with NeXT folks within a few years, and the combined company behaved more like NeXT than Apple. Th

The short version is most of Apple's management was replaced with NeXT folks within a few years, and the combined company behaved more like NeXT than Apple. The degree to which Apple in the 90s was dysfunctional is pretty legendary, they started trying to replace the creaking 68k, cooperative multitasking hacked in after the fact classic Mac OS before 1988 and were still shipping what were supposed to be short-term life support releases until 2001 (...and really until 2002 because 10.0 on available hardware was miserable). They kept losing their replacement plans to development hell. A/UX was a nifty Mac/UNIX hybrid that came out in '88, and it was going to be the future, but was expensive (real UNIX license), deeply tied to 68k hardware, and the 4.0 PowerPC port never came out because it collapsed under the weight of "Build a combined OSF platform out of A/UX and (IBM's) AIX that takes over from both and rules the whole computing market" ambitions. That joint project also included Taligent, an OOP-platform-thing that is basically the benchmark for failed software development. There was also Copland, which was a separate in-house microkernel-based OS that was supposed to be MacOS 8, developed between '94-96... that the Platinum theme was the only survivor from. I think part of the reason they _did_ go with NeXT is OpenStep looked a lot like the Pink/Taligent platform plan, but not bungled. ...I have a draft of a few-page humorous telling of the "How Apple and IBM spent 15 years failing to write OSes" story but I keep tweaking it and need to dig up my copy of _Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders_ to add a few references, and find some better reference material for the OS/2 fiasco between IBM and Microsoft that is one of the core "all this 90s tech industry dysfunction fits together" points most of the tellings miss.