I was thinking the same thing. WebObjects has been on life support for many, many years now. What's shocking is that it had any level of external support 10 years ago, not that that support is ending now. It reads like CNN was framing it as another Apple doom-and-gloom, whatever-will-they-do-without-Steve story, especially with the claim that it was one of his "favorite projects" [?], and OMG now they're cancelling it, this is proof that it's not the same company anymore, etc.

Its importance to NeXT in the '90s was more as a life raft than as something they thought would sweep the tech world and make billions of dollars for them. It was something Steve was hoping NeXT could pivot to instead of going out of business (NeXT was circling the drain in the mid-'90s, just not as dramatically as Apple was). It came out after NeXT had left the hardware business, after it became clear that going software-only wasn't going to save them, and in the early days of the dotcom bubble, so it would've made a lot of sense to try to hitch their wagon to up-and-coming web technologies.

This was before Apple paid a lot of money to get taken over by NeXT, and the rest is history! The life raft never caught on in a huge way (although it obviously found some valuable niches to fill), and after a couple more years it became clear that a life raft was no longer needed, and may have even become a distraction.

It's true. Knowing CNN, I'm surprised they didn't make the headline:

"New technologies Trump Apple"