Allchin on 'hard lessons'

In an e-mail to his team yesterday, top Microsoft Windows executive Jim Allchin was careful to point out that he still has a long time left with the company, even after the disclosure yesterday that he plans to retire at the end of next year. "This is not a retirement announcement mail," he wrote. "It is planning for the future in the responsible way."

Along those lines, he wrote about one of the issues that he plans to address during his remaining time -- the internal complexities that have caused some employees to complain that the company has become too weighed down by its own processes to bring new products to market as quickly as it needs to. The most prominent example has been the delays in bringing the next Windows version to market.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the restructuring announced yesterday is intended to make the company more agile. Beyond that, here's what Allchin had to say on the subject in his message yesterday:

"We've learned some hard lessons over the last few years and my hope is that we will use those lessons wisely. My dream is for a much more agile, quality driven engineering organization with fewer roadblocks and more open highway to speed on. I also have a dream about fewer bad dependencies, better layering, and choosing when we do integration at the right time in the product cycle -- avoiding doing it too early. The result will be better code and more innovation, sooner for customers. I see these dreams across all products. We have made good progress on these dreams over the last 12-18 months or so. And I plan on devoting even more of my time to ensure that we continue making these dreams a reality."