I don't think Acorn "dropped the ball". They were doing amazing things, but they simply weren't IBM, and their PC wasn't an IBM PC. The corporate world was rapidly standardizing on PCs and MS DOS, and that it was crap didn't really matter; it was more powerful than what the corporate world before, and it had all the support it needed for business applications. Superior architecture didn't matter; killers apps did. I wish it was different and really hoped the Archimedes would be the new standard. Well, decades later the ARM would finally become the new standard.