Yes, they picked Steve Jobs, and NeXTSTEP was quite advanced with ObjectOriented-UI and its UI-builder - most of the stuff is still there with a new Theme and called MacOS X. Companies like Pixar used NeXTSTEP.

BeOS was quite interesting too. Though it lacked multi-user support, and had a small user community. Its BeFS filesytem had an indexing feature that dwarfs all desktop search features even today - and Windows "Cairo" (1996) / WinFS (2006) that tried to accomplish it too, turned out as vamporeware.

Both NeXTSTEP and BeOS were ahead with multimedia support like real time video player and WYSIWYG editor.