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This is completely false, many NeXT people still work there.

So you think that they would be able to build MacOS X and Cocoa today if they didn't already exist?

In what sense?

In a technical sense. Do the remaining NeXT employees still at Apple have the technical skills to create Mac OS X and Cocoa?

Yes, I would imagine so. I don't think the result would look exactly like what it does now since needs have changed, but I can imagine that they could do it.

Would they want to?

If you were to build a system with no requirement for backward compatibility with cocoa or macOS, or even knowledge from such a thing existing, we have still moved forward three decades from not just NeXT, but the computing industry that NeXT was built to serve.

I'd assume their requirements would be drastically different, and the system they created would be drastically different as a result. The requirements aren't even easy to hypothesize, since iOS would never have existed.

I recommend reading on Steve Jobs biographies of what was done at NeXT, regarding whatever industry your mean.

> Would they want to?

The point is that they cannot, they do not have the technical skills to do so, whether they want to or not.

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