The Internet has been buzzing today about a vintage-2004 email that Microsoft’s Jim Allchin sent to co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer about the likelihood of his buying a Macintosh if he had not been a Microsoft employee. From what I can tell (see Computerworld’s December 11, 2006 article, “Windows development chief: ‘I would buy a Mac if I didn’t work for Microsoft’” for details), the email was not leaked by Allchin or any other Microsoft employee; instead, it was read in open court by the plaintiff’s lawyers in an Iowa class-action lawsuit against Microsoft (here’s a link to the Groklaw website that discusses some of the details of the case in more detail).

The Computerworld article says that “Microsoft, through its public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide Inc., was unable to comment on the Allchin e-mail immediately,” but I’d be willing to bet that there was a flurry of phone calls, emails, and damage-control sessions after word trickled out of the Polk County District Courthouse in beautiful downtown Des Moines, Iowa. And on December 12th, Allchin posted a blog entry on the Windows Vista blog entitled “Setting the Record Straight,” in which said that his 2004 email “was a rant encouraging a change to the way we were building Windows at the time. In the email, I made a comment for effect about buying a Mac if I was not working at Microsoft. Taken out of context, this comment could be confusing. Let me set the record straight …” which he then endeavors to do for the next few paragraphs.

Okay, listen: I don’t care what Allchin said three years ago about the Mac. I don’t care if he secretly bought a Mac then, or intends to publicly buy a Mac when he retires from Microsoft in January 2007. And I don’t care whether he truly believes, as he says in his December 12th blog posting, that “Vista has turned into a phenomenal product, better than any other OS we’ve ever built and far, far better than any other software available today, in my opinion.” Maybe that’s really his opinion, maybe it’s really the opinion of the PR firm. Maybe Vista really is that good, maybe it’s not. I have my own opinion on the matter, but it’s not germane to this discussion; I’ll let the Vista-lovers and Vista-bashers fight it out amongst themselves.

What I find significant about this is the reminder that almost all of our communications these days — whether personal or business — are digitized and recorded. That’s obviously true of word-processing documents, web pages, blog postings, and email messages; but it’s also true, in more and more cases, of telephone calls and voice-mail messages, which can be (and are) digitized and stored away in someone’s archive. Some of it gets deleted, lost, corrupted, or destroyed (accidentally, or deliberately, as in the case of the Nixon Watergate tapes); but a lot of it lives on forever.

And some of it finds its way into the spotlight weeks, months, or even years after it was created. Sometimes it’s an official act of disclosure, as in the case of Allchin’s email; sometimes it’s an accidental or inadvertent disclosure; and sometimes it’s leaked to reporters or the public (via YouTube or other channels on the Internet). Sometimes the leak comes from organizations that you would think would be very security-conscious, such as the recent leak of Donald Rumsfeld’s memo about possible changes in the Iraq war strategy(see “Where’s the Leak?” in the December 4th issue of the Washington Post), or the leak of a classified memo (not just any old memo, but a classified memo) by National Security Advisor Steven Hadley about his assessment of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (see CNN’s November 29th article, “White House memo doubts Iraqi leader’s abilities“).

So here’s the point: leaving politicians and government officials out of the discussion at this point, if a corporate executive’s memos and emails are likely to find their way into the public at some point, why not go public with it in the first place — so that you can minimize the chances that it will be published by surprise, at the worst possible time, and in the worst possible light — i.e., out of context. Let’s face it: the Iowa class-action prosecutors did not read Allchin’s email aloud in court for idle amusement, or to help keep the jury sufficiently amused that they would not fall asleep after lunch. They did it for a purpose, and their purpose — which may or may not eventually be accepted by the jury, in the form of a guilty verdict — was to Microsoft’s detriment. If that’s the likely fate of a sincere, but nevertheless highly critical, email from Jim Allchin to the top executives of the company, why not get it out in the open, in the form of publicly available blogs written by Mr. Allchin for the benefit of Gates, Ballmer, and the rest of the world?

Okay, okay, I know that sounds crazy: what are the chances that a sane executive in a highly competitive software company would publicly write, as Allchin wrote privately:

“In my view, we lost our way … I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems our customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that does not translate into great products.”

But here’s the thing: while various Microsoft employees and fanatically loyal Microsoft customers might have disagreed with Allchin’s critical assessment, nobody would have been surprised. It’s not as if the problems were a secret, known only to a secret group of insiders — everyone knew that Vista was late (only two years late at the time Allchin wrote his email, but ultimately five years late), and that it was full of problems. Acknowledging these problems, and then facing up to them, would have been a welcome breath of fresh air in the stale atmosphere of Redmond, Washington. Allchin could have written his critical assessment on Day 1, and then followed it up with another blog on Day 2 that said, “Yup, we lost our way — but now we’ve found it again, and here’s what we’re going to do …” And then perhaps his thousands of minions, toiling away on the innards of Vista, could have started blogging, “And here’s what we’re doing to fix those security problems, and get rid of the bloat …”

Arguably, some of this is starting to happen now. I’ve heard conference presentations by Microsoft managers claiming that the company now has 3,000 external blogs, and another 10,000 internal blogs (sorry, I haven’t been able to get any independent confirmation of those numbers). It’s impressive to see that the CEO of Sun Microsystems and the Vice-Chairman of General Motors have their own blogs, but I’m more impressed by the notions of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of mid-level and worker-bee-level employees blogging.

If you’re one of those anti-blogging managers (”ABM’s,” as I called them in yesterday’s blog posting), go ahead and ignore all of this. But keep in mind that somewhere within your company, one or more of your employees are busily writing an email message, or a memo, or a report, that will look truly awful when it sees the light of day, and gets picked up in an industry trade magazine like Computerworld, or a mainstream newspaper like the New York Times. Chances are it will happen — and if it does, you won’t get any sympathy from me.