Why is the gear shifter placed where it is?

Why is the gear selector on some cars on the floor and some on the steering wheel. Our Chevy Tahoe (we hate it with a passion lol) has a sterring wheel mounted selector and our Toyota Highlander had one on the floor. At first I thought it was big vehicle had steering wheel and small vehicles had floor shifters. They're both automatic and classified as a SUV even though the Toyota is tiny, so what gives? Do auto makers flip a coin? There has to be a rhyme or reason. My car has a floor shifter (Toyota Solara) and my sister's mustang does too. I find the shifter in the way sometimes, like when I'm trying to get coins out of the ashtray.

Just the way it was designed

Chevy Tahoe is just a modified Chevy pickup. It shares it's basic architecture with the pickup. It is a cost saving measure to share as many components between vehicles as possible. If you look way back to the thirties, most every car had a floor shifter since they all had manual transmissions. In 1940, the column shift debuted in the Ford Cars and pickups, even though it was still a manual transmission. In the late 40's and early 50's, the automatic transmission came to be and the shifter stayed on the column since that was what drivers were used to. In the 60's, muscle cars had console floor shifters even for the auto trans. It is a matter of cost as well as design efficiency as to whether a vehicle is column or floor shifted. The new Chryslers and Dodges have a rotating knob on the dash as a shifter- check that out! Even cars from the 60's had pushbutton gear selectors for a short time.