What if NeXT had gone public instead of being bought by Apple?

[Strategos' Risk]

This past week was the 20th anniversary of Apple's purchase of NeXT Software, Steve Jobs' company which provided NEXTSTEP, the operating system that eventually became Mac OS X, as well as iOS. However, this article explains that despite substantial losses of nearly $300 million over three years, NeXT had been planning to offer an IPO, taking advantage of the wild early days of the post-Netscape Dot-Com Boom, as well as WebObjects, NeXT's software for building dynamic websites. The article asks:

What might have happened? WebObjects was highly admired at the time of its release, and in fact powered Dell’s original online store. WebObjects was significantly more flexible and advanced than many competing technologies. But with its purchase by Apple, WebObjects gradually languished and was discontinued. Would an independent, post-IPO NeXT have dominated the web application market in the 1990s with WebObjects? Could it have ridden out the burst of the dot.com bubble in 2001? We will never know.

So what do you think? Related discussion here.