True. Much as they were deeply involved in PCs. But the mainframe people and the desktop people identified pretty strongly with their respective character sets in the old days.

There is no technological reason EBCDIC couldn't have been the encoding for the whole desktop revolution, other than the dramatic central control vs local control, mainframe vs desktop thing.

There is some truth to the claim that whenever IBM reached a fork in the road they usually found a way to go both ways, at least for many years in the olden days.