Sure, the x86 family took a commanding lead over that time... But over in the corner where nobody was looking, in 1987 Acorn shipped the Archimedes with this RISC based processor they called the 'Acorn RISC Machine', or ARM... and it's looking increasingly like that whole x86/68x00 fight was a sideshow.
That is a very weird interpretation of what happened.
Acorn had horrible software, the hardware did not evolve as fast as x86 and after a few years hype it was pretty much dead.
What eventually saved it was basically an accident: due to lack of manpower the design was extremely simple, which turned out to translate to power efficiency.
Edit: the original designer put a very positive spin on things by saying that leadership gave them two things they needed to succeed: no money and no people.
