Re: MS Windows started this
No, Microsoft did not start this, they did not even promote it, and they certainly don't practice it even 3 or 4 decades after it was "normal" in some places.
When the Mac came out, there were three volumes to the developer's guide - with one of them dedicated entirely to the user interface. it laid out if great detail how menus should work, what should be on them, how dialogs should work, etc, etc. I don't doubt that some of it was copied form others - a lot of the Mac UI came from Xerox PARC - but they did do a fair bit of their own research.
For example, they initially had "Cancel" and "Do It". Then they observed that people were cancelling at unexpected times. Turns out that they'd misread "Do It" as "Dolt" and didn't like the inference - for anyone who doesn't get it, calling someone a "dolt" in the US is quite an insult.
Because the standards were so clearly laid down, anyone ignoring them (such as MS when it ported Office) faced massive user complaints and fell into line.
But in the MS world, it's a different matter. MS can't even be consistent across it's own software. And BTW, it only adopted ctrl-C for copy etc after users got used to cmd-C etc on the Mac. I now have to use Windows on my work laptop and it's a completely flippin annoying mess of inconsistency. Ctrl-W closes windows (or tabs), some of the time. it doesn't in Outlook where it does something completely different. It doesn't in Explorer if it's displaying a PDF file. In explorer, closing the last tab closes the window, in Adobe PDF viewer, it leaves you with a list of recently viewed files.
THERE IS NOT A LOT OF CONSISTENCY in the Windows world. And I agree completely with the "lets redesign the UI again, people have got too used to the old one" approach MS seem to apply.