Back in the late 80s & early 90s, when we were just coming out of the stone age of user interfaces (and companies were suing each other over the "look-and-feel" of things like a trash can), one arguement you'd commonly hear is that desktop applications needed a standard way of doing things so that users could move from one application to another without having to learn how to do everything all over again from scratch.
One common analogy used was the interface on a car--how all cars were standard, so once you learned how to drive one car, you could drive any other one.
Well, sadly, this analogy (like so many others people tried to apply to the computer industry) is flawed, if not a complete myth.
Oh sure, the gas pedal and brake are roughly the same shape and one can usually press the proper one without much thought; but as soon as you get past the basics, every single car goes its own way. And these days some of the gadgets don't even try to be obvious. Maybe it was simpler once apon a time, but the last car I bought came with a 500+ page owners manual.
I spent last week driving around in an american made van, and absolutely everything was in a different place than I was expecting it. The lights were on the dash instead of the column, the wipers were where the lights should have been, the shifter was where I expected the wipers to be, and the parking break was where I was expecting the shifter (which took me several moments to unravell since I just got done retraining myself to a floor pedal break in the highlander). Luckily I didn't need to quickly reach for any of these controls in an emergency, or it would have been all over.
