Motorola jerked around their customers by announcing the deprecation and death of the 68k not once but twice; first the 88k (total flop), then the PowerPC.
Intel played around with making fancy new alternative architectures, too (i960, i860). But it never gave any of its PC customers the impression that x86 was going to be murdered. (Well, until Itanium, but that's much later and was almost serious trouble for them.)
The switch to PowerPC almost killed Apple, in my opinion. They couldn't afford the chaos and instability. System 7.6 on PowerPC was terribly unstable, and offered little to no advantages.
Meanwhile Intel iterated on the (basically inferior) x86 architecture and we got Pentium & Pentium I and proved you didn't have to go RISC.
A few years later Motorola/Freescale rolled out ColdFire, which did for 68k what Intel did for x86. But probably about 3-4 years too late, and targeted really only for embedded devices.
68k was great. But these days I don't think I'd want a big-endian machine.
Intel played around with making fancy new alternative architectures, too (i960, i860). But it never gave any of its PC customers the impression that x86 was going to be murdered. (Well, until Itanium, but that's much later and was almost serious trouble for them.)
The switch to PowerPC almost killed Apple, in my opinion. They couldn't afford the chaos and instability. System 7.6 on PowerPC was terribly unstable, and offered little to no advantages.
Meanwhile Intel iterated on the (basically inferior) x86 architecture and we got Pentium & Pentium I and proved you didn't have to go RISC.
A few years later Motorola/Freescale rolled out ColdFire, which did for 68k what Intel did for x86. But probably about 3-4 years too late, and targeted really only for embedded devices.
68k was great. But these days I don't think I'd want a big-endian machine.