#4 Not knowing the right market for NeXT computer

The NeXT Computer was a workstation computer developed, manufactured, and sold by NeXT Inc., a company founded by Steve Jobs and several other veterans of the Macintosh and Lisa teams, from 1988 until 1990.

The NeXT Computer was not a great commercial success at the level of high volume personal computers such as the Apple II, the Macintosh, or Wintel PCs; some of the workstations were sold to universities, financial institutions, and government agencies however. Some may still be used around the world as servers and hobbyist desktops.

Although Jobs tried to spin NeXT computer as an ultimate success when the assets were sold to Apple in 1996 for $429 million, few in Silicon Valley agreed. The company struggled from the start to find the right markets and customers, and Jobs himself described the fact in a video  as, "We've had, historically, a very hard time figuring out exactly who our customer was, and I'd like to show you why."

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