Actually MS has had really consistent and great UX. To the point where any slightly computer-literate person would get an intuition about where something ought to be located and be almost always correct.
It is not as beginner-friendly as apples products, but far more user-friendly.
My main work machine is windows - I wouldn’t go that far though I think I know where you are coming from. From where I sit some of their engineering decisions seem much more driven by platform goals, etc, rather than user experience.
Which version of Windows are you using at work? It has definitely gone downhill since Windows 7, hence this entire conversation. I'm curious if you could expand on the platform goals and how that has affected things.
Could see the argument that Windows is as user-friendly (I would disagree, but I could see it), and as consistent (all OSes have their weird UI hangups) but not "far more".
Last time I used Windows it was more inconsistent than ever, with two completely separate environments (metro and whatever they call the classic one), and three control panels (to which their answer is to shrug and say "just use the search box")
Microsoft does have good UX though - in the Office team. Just not in Windows.
Yes, metro is an unexplainable mess.
Thankfully you pretty much never need to use it for anything past installation-day.
Windows has been the dominant desktop operating system for going on three decades now. You don't get to that position by being hard to use for the average user. I'm curious what other concerns you think may have trumped usability over the majority of Microsoft's reign? I'll give you one to start off with that the DOJ fortunately shut down -- Consolidation (e.g. bundling IE into Windows Explorer).
This was not meant as a comment on the preference between MacOS and Windows, or the user experience.
What I am questioning was the assertion that UX was the major engineering driver for MS in building windows. i.e. "optimized for".
While I can buy the argument that apple's engineering was driven by UX (for good or for ill) it doesn't seem to me that this was true for Microsoft. Not that they never think of UX, but it is sometimes trumped by other concerns.