If what MS was doing was truly "crappy", then MS would have heard about it long before now and scrapped the crap.
It may not be perfect, but it is good enough and is the widely recognized and defacto standard.
Speaking of crappy tab contol designs, I saw one in a piece of software (not written in LabVIEW) where there were tab on the side and tabs on the bottom. Basically one tab control inside one particular page of the outer level tab control. (I'm sure the side tabs were written in the way you seem to dislike so much Paul). What was bad was that it was very confusing to know whether the bottom tabs or the side tabs were the ones to click on to change the page you were looking at at the moment.
paul_cardinale: My comment was based on observed behavior of users and their bug reports. It appears that in many cases, a majority of users feel that the inconsistency is a worse form of crap than a bad UI because it makes a bad UI worse. It is not a disservice in that case.
Aside from philosophicaldiscussions about what MS and other major players thinks, I believe that give options to the programmer. He will choose what he think it is the best. Hopefullyhis costumer will agree.
The flaw in your argument: When servicing a minority of users, developers have to be careful not to harm the majority of users. If an option is something that will not be used by most users and is a bad idea when used by *most* of the users who choose it, then the greater service is to not provide the option and spare people having to learn about an option that they will never use. Yes, it limits flexibility by the small number of users who would use it and use it beneficially, but that's generally a worth while tradeoff. When you factor in the expense of adding options (every feature costs money in both development and maintenance), it doesn't make sense to add every conceivable option.
Let me be clear that there are two separate conversations in this thread...
The specific question was why LV didn't provide this option right off the bat.
Then there's the general question of the philosophy of adding options.
This post is addressing the general case. Personally, adding rotation to the tabs would be fine by me in this specific case, but I also agree with why it wasn't done originally.
