Windows Wine and Virtual Machines

Almost every regular desktop Linux user I know keeps a virtual machine with an old version of Windows around. I’m included in this group, I still run Windows XP in a VM, and will until it no longer works or the need for it is gone. I expect that the need will be the first to go, as the Windows only applications that I use are migrating off to web apps, like the latest release of VMware’s Vcenter server. This personal, anecdotal evidence is what I see as the final failure of the Wine project. Wine promised us the ability to run Windows applications on Linux, but in my experience very few actually do.