Steve Jobs was forced out and pushed away by the Apple board after losing a power struggle for control with then CEO at the time John Sculley, mainly over over pricing the Apple Mac.
NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc) was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets. NeXT was founded in 1985 by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs, after he resigned from Apple, along with his co-workers. NeXT introduced the first NeXT Computer in 1988, and the smaller NeXTstation in 1990. The NeXT computers experienced relatively limited sales, with estimates of about 50,000 units shipped in total. Nevertheless, their innovative object-oriented NeXTSTEP operating system and development environment were highly influential.
The NeXT Computer and NeXTSTEP operating system were the platform used for creating the World Wide Web, as well as creating the first app store, which was originally demonstrated to Steve Jobs in 1993.
NeXT later released much of the NeXTSTEP system as a programming environment standard called OpenStep. NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993 to concentrate on marketing OPENSTEP for Mach, its own OpenStep implementation, for several OEMs. NeXT also developed WebObjects, one of the first enterprise Web application frameworks. WebObjects never became very popular because of its initial high price of $50,000, but it remains a prominent early example of a Web server based on dynamic page generation rather than on static content.
Apple purchased NeXT in 1997 for $429 million and 1.5 million shares of Apple stock. As part of the agreement, Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO of NeXT Software, returned to Apple, the company he had co-founded in 1976.[2] The founder promised to merge software from NeXT with Apple's hardware platforms, eventually resulting in OS X, iOS, and now watchOS and tvOS.[3] Parts of these operating systems incorporated the OPENSTEP foundation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT 
