IBM had waited a little and selected this rather than the spastic 8088...

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/motorola-68000-a-32-bit-brain-in-a-16-bit-body/

 

I created a few 'toy' OS systems using the 68000, written Modula-2 on the Atari-ST. The processor was missing some very important features (VM and true protected instructions) that the 68010+ fixed plus the low-level code for context switching/traps was nasty (up to 16 page faults in 1 instruction) for deterministic timing. They (680x0) were used a lot in commercial/industrial products but the high cost and low volume (poor yields) meant the processor engineering at Motorola could not keep-up with x86 advances (386+ flat mode).

Intel/SPARC/MIPS/PowerPc deserved to win. Motorola 680x0 lost the 32-bit computer race.

https://userpages.umbc.edu/~vijay/mashey.on.risc.html