Yes, NeXT was in fact a notorious failure by 1997, which had a lot of us scratching our heads at Amelio paying $400M for it. (And that the x86 version of the OS

Yes, NeXT was in fact a notorious failure by 1997, which had a lot of us scratching our heads at Amelio paying $400M for it. (And that the x86 version of the OS was slow and fragile. But, yes, unlike BeOS, you could print. And that still mattered at the time.) The lessons Steve learned at NeXT enabled the huge success of his second tenure at Apple.