That's ironic, since NeXTSTEP 3.1 and later did run on Intel x86 machines (although with a much smaller universe of supported hardware than Linux/Windows).
It ran on those machines, but the license cost was still something like $800 a seat if I recall.
At a time when Linux was up and coming and starting to be quite usable for all sorts of things.
NeXT blew it on licensing costs for WebObjects, as well. They were early to the game on a very powerful application server, with a powerful ORM, etc. But it was hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy it. I went to a seminar/training on it in early 97ish I think? And it was priced completely out of reach for what startups etc at the time could afford. So almost nobody used it. Just a few big companies (I believe Dell's website ran on it for a time.)
Yes, and Dell running on WebObjects was such an embarrassment that Microsoft strong-armed them into switching to MS products (which at first were totally broken).
