It was apparent at the time that Steve Jobs was not a good executive nor understood the computer market at the time. Jobs's vision ended up aligning better with the market when he went back, but it didn't fit during the 80's.
Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of how Sam Altman, in his now capacity as a researcher for Microsoft will probably not produce anything half as innovative as NeXT (even if just for the fact that their computers were used to make Doom)