It might appear that way if Microsoft was the only company one was following back in the 90s. While they were freezing the market with promises of what Chicago would be, NeXT had already brought the future - and that codebase still feels like the future today.
Except that a NeXTCube cost $10k at the same time that a decent windows PC cost $1.5-2k. Even though both NeXTStep and NT represented full, proper 32-bit "modern" operating systems and were both invented in the early 90s it took until 2001/2002 for both to come of age as consumer grade operating systems (NeXTStep as OS X, NT as Windows XP). In the meantime MS put forth an interim solution (Windows 9x) that was still suitable for consumer-grade PC hardware, resulting in a continuation of Windows market dominance and billions of dollars in profits for Microsoft. In contrast, NeXT took the intellectual high road, stubbornly refusing to compromise its vision of the future, resulting in massive financial losses, being forced to lay off 2/3 of its employees, and a long, slow slide into bankruptcy and irrelevancy before being acquired by Apple (which had stretched the decrepit Mac OS to its breaking point).
Had NeXT maintained a little more pragmatism and a little less stubborn pride it's possible that they could have become the next Apple or the next Microsoft, rather than merely a juicy intellectual property morsel for the real players in the industry to pick up and take advantage of.
Sure, I couldn't afford a NeXTCube in 1990. But by 1993 I was running NeXTstep on my generic intel hardware, a full two years prior to the release of Windows 95. (Incidentally, I also had the pleasure of running it on a SPARC laptop made by Tadpole, and on one of the HP PA-RISC "gecko" machines, but those were owned by employers. I could afford to run it on a PC, though.) But, you're right, people continued to believe that NeXTstep required a $10000 machine long after it did not.
