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It has nothing to do with IBM, but with internationalization. More and more websites and applications (don't even mention databases) need to be able to handle multiple languages and characters. The old ISO pages cannot handle that due to restrictions. They invented all kind of tricks in the beginning, creating nightmares (I have seen enough). The adoptation of Unicode solved a lot, but it was a slow process. Funny that you mention Microsoft, since they were actually quite late to the party with regards to applications and Windows.
Quite frankly there is no reason at all at the moment not to use UTF.
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