I think that's a very fair and accurate assessment, but surprising they let it go so far out of control. They really started out going for the academic market for years, but there really wasn't much demand there.
Well they were already buying Sun and Sgi boxes. I don’t know the numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those Unix machines were far better priced.
NeXT suffered the same commercial challenges Apple faced. You have to develop things in THEIR world, albeit a more polished, user friendly one.
We wrote a WYSIWYG editor for Yellow Pages (Gouden Gids in NL). It was also used for the Golden Pages in Ireland, the Puerto Rico YP, the YP for Norway, the YP in SA and the NTT one in Japan.
Understandably for the time, people were blown away by it.