Plenty of people were but Apple was on a path to bankruptcy. Turning that around meant killing some stuff and letting some people go. Some of that was stuff that people outside of Apple liked, but part of Apple’s problem was that they hadn’t been putting Apple first in their list of priorities, and they really needed to.

I like to think of Apple as an unfocused fount of innovation during its "interregnum" years (1985-1996). There were many interesting projects that came out of Apple during this time, including (but not limited to) Pink/Taligent, SK8, A/UX, Newton, OpenDoc, and Dylan. As a major fan of the contributions that Xerox PARC made to the world, it's really cool to think of an alternate timeline where Apple leapfrogged even NeXT when it came to developing an operating system that combined the best 1990s research in operating systems and programming languages with Apple's experience developing usable, pleasant interfaces. Just imagine the ideas of OpenDoc combined with a very flexible object-oriented language like Common Lisp or Dylan to create a component-based system that is essentially a Lisp machine running on mid-1990s Power Macintoshes with a Macintosh interface. I personally think many of these concepts should be revisited today, especially in the free, open-source software world, but updated to reflect modern concerns such as security and the Web.

But an Apple built on those ideas wasn't meant to be; Apple lacked a coherent vision and leadership willing to carry out that vision, which led to epic failures in project management (Pink/Taligent and Copland come to mind) that helped contribute to Apple's dire situation in 1996 when it was fighting to stay alive.

Steve Jobs brought not only a vision for Apple (the marriage of the Macintosh user interface with OPENSTEP technology), but he also enforced this vision. This led to the death of Newton, OpenDoc, and many other technologies. However, this led to the birth of Mac OS X and compelling Apple hardware, which helped revive Apple and helped pave the way for Apple's inroads into consumer electronics (e.g., the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad). For a long time Mac OS X, in my opinion, was heads and shoulders better than its competitors on the desktop, and even today macOS is my favorite of the mainstream desktops.