I wanted to write a post to bring everyone's attention to a "little thing" that has a lot of significance on a couple of levels.

It's a mailing list post from Fernando Cassia about an improvement to input scheme on the OSD alpha input method. If you've used the alpha input for any amount of time, you've probably noticed the issue he's talking about, the special chars are noticeably harder to input than the other characters.

It's a "minor nuisance," but the sum (or absence) of those "minor nuisances" practically define how well you like a product (or don't). Think about how you feel about your cell phone, your pvr, your TV or any appliance in your home, chances are the first thing you think of is some minor detail that you hate (or love) about it.

Our entire company structure was defined to leverage open source and community feedback to attack those details, and Fernando's post is a great example of it in action. In this case Fernando gave an articulation of how to solve this issue, it gets fed into bugzilla and someone on our internal team (or an interested volunteer) suddenly has specific instructions on how to fix it!

Just out of curiosity while I was writing this post, I poked into bugzilla and found that we had about 1400 resolved bugs in bugzilla, some are big issues, but many are user input "details" that make the product better, and there are already 1400 of them! The evolving nature of the OSD means that we'll never call it finished, and it's easy to focus on all the things that are yet to be done. From time to time we should look back and review all the details that have been completed. I think you'll find many many of them that would *never* get fixed in 90% of all closed products.