One senior manager at IBM explained it to me as follows: Most senior management at IBM has been with the company for a long time. Most of those went through the OS/2 era. Many people may not realize it, but IBM put their heart and soul into OS/2 - and were burned very, very badly by it. As a consequence, many people at IBM are understandably very reluctant to contemplate another attack on Windows dominance of the desktop.
This doesn't mean that I think helping Wine would be bad for IBM (or I wouldn't have been such a pest), but it may help folks to understand why IBM isn't very focused on Linux as a desktop OS.
Jeremy
Ok, I understand your point. But I think there is a big difference here. They "put their heart and soul into OS/2". I'm not asking for them to do the same with WINE. All I ask is to contributing a little from their huge Linux budget on WINE. Even if WINE doesn't work out the way everyone is imagining they will not have lost much, only 1% of the Linux budget.
Putting heart and soul into it is something that no one is demanging...
Roland