The man obviously has a fire in his belly, and NeXT obviously didn't have the cultural impact that he was hoping for. He launched directly into a string of incredible projects: iMac, iPod, and OS X... I can't help but wonder where that energy would've gone if he wasn't put back in charge of Apple.
My guess is that Jobs would have made his killing by selling Pixar to Disney — and would be CEO of that company. The funny thing about NeXT and Pixar is that they re-energized two giant companies. By the way had Disney purchased Pixar they might also have grabbed NeXT and that company (sort of like Sony) could be in the computer biz.
It's also interesting to note that the founders of Google were interested in Steve Jobs as CEO when they first started — so they may have purchased NeXT to do that and poor Eric Schmidt would have been out in the cold these last few years.
As for Apple without Jobs my guess is that they could either have faded or "just held on" by adopting the Be Inc. operating system (and perhaps Jean-Louis Gassée as well). My guess is that if Apple was in fade mode they would have been merged with Sun or purchased by Oracle.
Steve would likely have ran Pixar and probably continued at NeXT. Once Apple went under(they were 90 days from insolvency when he came back) he'd have likely poached a large number of the creative team, especially Jony Ive to NeXT. Today, we'd have NePhones.
He's a product guy. He would have run some kind of company making some kind of consumer-electronics item that would attempt to be the best in its class. Without the talent, resources, brand, and exposure of Apple to work with, he might or might not have been successful.
Immediately prior to Apple he was selling Corba, OLE, Web Objects, and other enterprisey middleware, and with the exact same fervor that he would later sell iMacs and iPods.
Here [1] is a rather surreal Jobs' keynote/demo in 1995, showing Interface Builder and "Distributed OLE" on Windows NT 3.51, among other things.
Back then Next was doing mostly OO/Web software, and Pixar was just starting. So I guess he could have done some Web/entertainment mashup a la Club Penguin, or maybe the Facebook of that parallel universe.
I think he would've stuck with the web, which NeXT was focusing on, but I wonder if he would have eventually embarked on an iPod or iPhone device outside of Apple.
It's also interesting to note that the founders of Google were interested in Steve Jobs as CEO when they first started — so they may have purchased NeXT to do that and poor Eric Schmidt would have been out in the cold these last few years.
As for Apple without Jobs my guess is that they could either have faded or "just held on" by adopting the Be Inc. operating system (and perhaps Jean-Louis Gassée as well). My guess is that if Apple was in fade mode they would have been merged with Sun or purchased by Oracle.