You can score it however you like, and I grant it wasn't a total disaster, but by the standards of high-tech investments, it was definitely a failure, albeit a gracefully executed one.
I will stand by the notion that it was a pity sale. The CEO is not a salable company asset. That Apple bought NeXT for so much as a way to make Jobs happy doesn't mean that NeXT did well; it just means that Apple really wanted Jobs. (Correctly, as it turns out.) Props to Jobs for cashing out his investors rather than just pocketing the money, though.
Apple did really want Jobs. But they also really wanted NeXT's operating system. The month before they bought NeXT, every pundit was predicting they'd buy the BeOS instead, because they all knew that Mac OS 9 wasn't going to cut it.
And now here I am, working on a system all of whose libraries have entry points prefixed with "NS".
Well, whatever. History rarely politely conforms to our categories. I suppose we could declare NeXT to be a "disaster" relative to every other company founded by Steve Jobs.
I will stand by the notion that it was a pity sale. The CEO is not a salable company asset. That Apple bought NeXT for so much as a way to make Jobs happy doesn't mean that NeXT did well; it just means that Apple really wanted Jobs. (Correctly, as it turns out.) Props to Jobs for cashing out his investors rather than just pocketing the money, though.