You are talking about the days when Apple was about to close its doors after the Copland failed experiment and NT was picking up steam against UNIX based workstations.
In 1996 it appeared NT was going to conquer the IT workstation desktops.
It must have been painful for him to give up on NeXT's beautiful hardware. To see his beautiful software running on lesser computers probably did hurt.
In 1996 it appeared NT was going to conquer the IT workstation desktops.
NeXT was also going multi-platform with OpenStep.