The Atari ST and similar machines like the Amiga and compact Macintoshes other than the SE/30 were not its competition, any more than the Sega Genesis was. Its immediate competition included Sun and SGI workstations (as well as other workstations) and the Mac II series - and for specific tasks, loaded 386DX and 486DX PCs. Sun was pivoting at that time to the SPARC platform and SGI to the MIPS platform, both away from Motorola 68K.
There were some high end Ataris and Amigas (Atart TT 030, Amiga 3000, etc.) but they came out a bit later. There was even the A3000UX that ran a Unix port!
Still, I agree. The 68K workstation was essentially obsolete by the time NeXT shipped. Sun was shipping early Sparc systems around the same time. The writing was on the wall. No wonder they didn't stick with their own hardware for very long.
Jon Rubenstein was said to have been cooking up a NeXT computer prototype based on Motorola 88k chips and would have been a serious contender in the workstation market, had it been realized sooner. Sadly, it ended up getting canceled right around the time NeXT became a software-only shop.
Honestly, Motorola is entirely to blame for losing out on the workstation market. They iterated too slowly and never took Intel seriously enough. I say this as I wistfully eyeball the lonely 68060 CPU I have sitting on my desk for a future project...
That would've been cool! The NeXT hardware was interesting. I have a Turbo slab in my retro collection.
Yeah, it seems Motorola lost their lead with the 68040. Intel was getting huge clock speed gains with the later 486/DX2, DX4, etc. From what I recall, a similarly clocked 040 was faster than a 486 on most benchmarks, but there was simply no way to compete with Intel's high clocks.
