[ghostberry]

One difference between Motorola and Intel, is Motorola was less concerned with breaking backwards compatibility.

If the 68k family had continued to evolve past the 1994s 68060, I'm sure they could have just dropped backwards compatibility to some of the more complex addressing modes, or just devoted less silicon to them, and making what remains faster. Kinda like happened with the ColdFire version of the 68k family.

[rbanffy]

The not-implemented instruction trapping in the 68K could be easily evolved to cover less frequently used instructions to make room for more optimized implementations of the frequently used ones.

What really killed the 68000 was the move to RISC, in particular Apple's move to PowerPC. That took away any hope of future evolution (they even managed to release the 68060 after that, but that was it) and collapsed the high-end 68K business.

[rogerbinns]

Note that Motorola also did the m88k which was their RISC approach. It generated a bit of interest, but was never successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000

The Motorola Series 900 machines were interesting - I had one under my desk at work for quite a while. They had stackable units, including one that contained a SCSI 3.5" floppy drive that was way faster than regular ones. We also had a DG unit with the m88k.

[stox]

A lot of what was the 88K was put into the PowerPC.