USB cord lengths

The thing I find interesting about USB devices is that more often than not, the cord is not long enough. Why is this? Joe bought me a USB vacuum for my computer for Christmas and the cord was so unbelievably short, we had to plug it into his laptop so I could clean my keyboard, and my keyboard is wireless! But the cord would barely reach around my tower so I couldn’t hold the keyboard near the tower to use the vacuum. Retarded.

Then I bought this USB hub. It works fine, except the cord is so short that it barely reaches from the back of the tower to halfway to the front, so it has to sit on top of the tower instead of my desk like I wanted. I just don’t get why the design is so flawed. Someone please give me a logical reason for this because it doesn’t make sense to me.