And before people down-mod me because I forgot to mention it, the reason why Jeff is perceiving that something is horribly broken there is not because there's a problem with classifying what kind of "request" the user made. If your developers are in the habit of ignoring feature requests because they're not bugs, you need either new developers or a new project manager.
"Work items" (whatever kind they are) should be implemented based on the value they add to the product, the company, the customers, etc. Bugs can be minor and requirements can be critical.
In the case Jeff discusses, yes, it's a bug, because it should match the requirements, which presumably include providing customers with the tools to build quality Windows applications. Is it a critical bug? Depends on the point of view. From a developer point of view it's not critical, and they are right to ignore it from that narrow perspective. "Critical bug", in developer-speak, means "The sky will fall when someone clicks that button". However, it should be critical to the windows UI guidelines team and they should be the stakeholder pushing to get it implemented, on the basis that it makes them look like dunces.
So the problem there is not about what you call the bug, it's about the fact that the windows UI guidelines team don't care enough (a fact more than obvious whenever I stare at a vista screenshot).
"Bugs can be minor and requirements can be critical"
Exactly, however "Feature requests" are always considered optional and "Bugs" are always pushed through triage. This distinction causes moderately important feature requests to be ignored while moderately important bugs are fixed.
Jeff's point is that the distinction between bugs and feature requests has the unintended consequence of weakening the sorted order of the priorities of this middle range of work items. Additionally, I would argue that identifying something as a either a bug or feature request doesn't provide any value. Spend that energy identifying customer impact.
If it doesn't provide any value and actually requires some effort, stop doing it.
"Work items" (whatever kind they are) should be implemented based on the value they add to the product, the company, the customers, etc. Bugs can be minor and requirements can be critical.
In the case Jeff discusses, yes, it's a bug, because it should match the requirements, which presumably include providing customers with the tools to build quality Windows applications. Is it a critical bug? Depends on the point of view. From a developer point of view it's not critical, and they are right to ignore it from that narrow perspective. "Critical bug", in developer-speak, means "The sky will fall when someone clicks that button". However, it should be critical to the windows UI guidelines team and they should be the stakeholder pushing to get it implemented, on the basis that it makes them look like dunces.
So the problem there is not about what you call the bug, it's about the fact that the windows UI guidelines team don't care enough (a fact more than obvious whenever I stare at a vista screenshot).