that is probably a difficult question:
why did the Motorola 68000 processor family almost completely fade away (with exception of some "embedded" controller solutions)
Still think it was far superior to Intel's 8086 concept (and much more programmer friendly!!!). Was it only wrong marketing or is there a real technical boundary that made the concept of the 68K fail? As far as I understood since somewhen in between all processors internally are RISC processors, and the modern Intel x86 processors have to emulate 8068 mode for compatibility.
The "problem" is strategic focus first of all and commitment to resources in an unviable market. ie There was no way of competing after all major computer manufacturers using the Motorola family either went bust or shifted focus (as in Apple's case). In any case PowerPC did replace the architecture for Personal Computers.
The 68K architecture did survive in the handheld market. The 68K architecture was for a long time in a huge proportion of the market of PDAs (ie Palm Powered) and also in Set-top boxes etc. Just because you do not see it on your desk doesn't mean anything. ie TI high end scientific calculators (full computers in their own right I may add as a proud owner of a TI-92+ and a Voyage200) use 68K processors (68010 actually :-) so a QL emulator on one of these babies would return PROCESSOR=10 like QPC ;-).
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