[bcrl]

It's not that Motorola failed to delivery a faster 68k, it's that IBM's actions forced them to invest in PowerPC at a time when they should have been focused on advancing 68k. The 68040 was quite competitive at the time with performance that beat the Pentium. And any time a company is forced to split resources across multiple product lines, none of the projects will be as successful as a more focused competitor. Since Intel had gobs more revenue from x86 than Motorola had from both PowerPC and 68k lines at the same time, Intel was instead able to invest more in development of x86 with multiple teams without the distraction of supporting dual architectures. Intel's progress accelerated while Motorola's limited resources were diluted across projects that didn't have any common infrastructure.

The complexity of developing validation tests suites for PowerPC alone would have sucked up all the software resources inside of Motorola at the time, as all the old 68k OSes and support code, etc had to be rebuilt from scratch for PowerPC. Not at all a small undertaking.