I think the biggest difference was vision: BeOS was shooting for the creative media market, while NeXT's biggest successes had come in very enterprise-ish verticals. demanded what they considered an unreasonable price. Most of the reports I've read suggest BeOS was actually Apple's first choice, but Be, Inc. In any case, NextStep didn't do anything in the short run for Apple - it took dozens of engineers about four years to turn NextStep into OS X, and it's hard to believe that they couldn't have done the same thing with BeOS. (It's important to remember that 'at that time' was 1999, which predates the first release of OpenOffice by over two years!) As subjective as it is, I preferred BeOS to Linux as a desktop OS at that time because the nascent app ecosystem was already nicer to use and, at least to me, more complete. Gobe Productive was an AppleWorks-like office suite (by the original authors of AppleWorks, no less), Pe was a good BBEdit-ish code editor, the image editor e-Picture resembled Macromedia Fireworks. I occasionally hear this, but it's at least worth noting that there are people - like me - who ran BeOS full-time.
