The Cancel Button

There is a little detail that has been bothering me ever since I designed my first linear interaction process: Where should the Cancel button be placed? My first instinct tells me that it should be on the left indicating movement backwards, after all, I am not progressing, but rather going backwards. In my mind, the Cancel button is was always situated on the left of any other buttons on an interface, but I wasn’t sure if this thinking of mine was universal. So, I went out to investigate. Turns out that the folks at Apple and the Linux UI guys agree with me, the cancel button should be on the left:
Apple:

Linux:

Windows (XP and Vista)

So, are the UI guys at Redmond wrong? I don’t really know but it just feel really wrong having a button that makes me go a step back located where I would think it would take me a step further and I will still be putting my cancel buttons on the left.