> First, what he calls "the desktop era" wasn't so much a desktop era as a Windows era - Windows ran the vast majority of desktops (and furthermore, there were plenty of inconsistencies between Windows and Mac).

That's overemphasising the differences considerably: on the whole Windows really did copy the Macintosh UI with great attention to detail and considerable faithfulness, the fact that MS had its own PARC people notwithstanding. MS was among other things an early, successful and enthusiastic Macintosh ISV, and it was led by people who were appropriately impressed by the Mac:

> This Mac influence would show up even when Gates expressed dissatisfaction at Windows’ early development. The Microsoft CEO would complain: “That’s not what a Mac does. I want Mac on the PC, I want a Mac on the PC”.

https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0184/ch6.x... It probably wouldn't be exaggerating all that wildly to say that '80s-'90s Microsoft was at the core of its mentality a Mac ISV, a good and quite orthodox Mac ISV, with a DOS cash-cow and big ambitions. (It's probably also not a coincidence that pre-8 Windows diverges more freely from the Mac model on the desktop and filesystem UI side than in regards to the application user interface.) And where Windows did diverge from the Mac those differences often ended up being integrated into the Macintosh side of the "desktop era": viz. the right-click context menu and (to a lesser extent) the old, 1990s Office toolbar. And MS wasn't the only important application-software house which came to Windows development with a Mac sensibility (or a Mac OS codebase).