https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/browse/next-computer-in...

But what did this staircase look like?

  Jobs found office space in Palo Alto, California, at 3475 Deer Creek Road, 
  occupying a glass-and-concrete building that featured a staircase designed by 
  the architect I. M. Pei. [0]

  NeXT's expansion prompted renting an office at 800 and 900 Chesapeake Drive, 
  in Redwood City, also designed by Pei. The architectural centerpiece was a 
  "floating" staircase with no visible supports. [0]

  One of their main features was the wood-and-steel staircase, which seemed to 
  float in mid-air, and came at a high cost of having elevators removed, upon 
  Steve's demand. The stairs would later inspire similar designs in the Apple 
  Retail Stores. Other striking features included a marble dining area and 
  $10,000 sofas. This lavish corporate environment was later understandably held 
  as evidence of what went wrong with NeXT. [1]

  I had planned to shoot Steve with the incredible floating cement staircase 
  I.M. Pei designed for him in the lobby, a precursor to the clear glass version 
  that later became famous in the Apple stores. We begin setting up lights and 
  talking things over with Steve’s team. Finally Steve came storming in, hours 
  late due to traffic on his way down from Pixar, and in a terrible mood. He 
  took one look at my set up and announced, “This is just stupid. We are not 
  doing this.” [2]

1. https://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/pics_places/next

2. https://menuez.com/journal/steve-jobs-stupid-idea

It was noted early on that they would either be the last hardware startup to make it, or the first well-funded one to fail...

Ages ago, I was using similarly spec'ed computers running Windows (ThinkPad 755c), Mac OS (Mac Quadra 950), and NeXTstep (25MHz '040 Cube)--- the Cube was by far the nicest and most stable and most capable --- fortunately, its legacy lives on in Mac OS since Apple's purchase of NeXT essentially resulted in NeXT taking over Apple (just we don't get the vertical menu, pop-up main menu, tear off sub-menus, Display PostScript, PANTONE colour license, nxhosting, or the "Unix expert" checkbox) --- really wish that the folks behind GNUstep and the various desktop projects would get more traction.

Was lucky enough to score copies of Adobe Illustrator and Altsys Virtuoso, and I still have Macromedia Freehand set to open .vrt files (Freehand 4 ~= Virtuoso 2).

Really miss Lotus Improv (I've never been able to convince an employer that it would be worth paying for me to have a license of Quantrix Financial Modeler), and WriteNow is still one of my favourite wordprocessors --- at least TeXshop was modeled on TeXview.app, and has many of the same capabilities and much the same feel --- for a long while, I was the only person in a Mac composition shop for whom it made sense to use Mac OS X, since I was using TeXshop, and it was more comfortable to me than TeXtures (I think the license I was using was serial #018).

Holy heck, looking at this in Google Earth: how I wish other companies had their back to some gorgeous land to go together across. What an incredible exponentiator, to be situated so nicely with some lands to walk across.

It had the requisite Steve Jobs interior design but that was augmented by an enormous mountain of white salt looming up behind it.

Sodium chloride. From evaporation ponds on the shores of the bay.

NeXT was not ahead of it's times. It hasn't been technically surpassed by any other product in the "next" 10 years.

So NeXT is one. IMHO, Amiga 1200, Archimedes and Sinclair QL are other ones.

It seems a mix of mismanagement and marketing (which maybe is still mismanagement).

Sic transit gloria mundi.