REDMOND — Without calling out its next-generation Windows desktop operating system by name, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates foreshadowed some of the forthcoming advances that the company is promising for its "Longhorn" wave of products.

Gates made his remarks during his kick-off keynote at the company's annual Faculty Summit here on Monday. Attending the two-day Summit are 350 U.S.-based faculty researchers. Microsoft is showing off a number of its emerging Microsoft Research (MSR) technologies — including its emerging e-learning technologies, and "Phoenix" compiler framework — at the event.

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Find Out About 'Phoenix'

The Redmond software company also unveiled its Hardware Empowerment Program (HEP) at the conference. The HEP is designed to help ease the access of researchers to Windows Embedded devices and support.

While Microsoft does not reveal its plans for incorporating MSR technologies into commercially available products, the company traditionally has made much of the fruit of its research available in Microsoft products that already are shipping today.

A number of MSR-seeded technologies are expected to show up in Longhorn in the next several years. "Longhorn" is the name Microsoft uses to refer to the wave of products that is due out around 2005. Within the Longhorn wave will be a new Windows client, a new Visual Studio .Net tool suite (code-named "Orcas") and new version of Office.

Gates told summit attendees that while the past decade was marked by strong advances in areas like networking and connectivity, "this decade is when the big advances will take place."

Gates listed as software breakthroughs that the company and its customers require in the coming years: Internet with Web services, dynamic data center capabilities, monitoring and feedback tools, ways to unlock business information, new social computing advances (especially in instant messaging) and Trustworthy Computing.

Gates also mentioned as "exciting research directions" developments in the areas of terrascale computing, wireless and mesh networks, new form factors, human-computing interaction, social computing, personal databases and cataloging, software development and machine learning.

Gates said that Microsoft is working on modeling tools that attempted to do what many ill-fated CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tools and UML (unified modeling language) tried to accomplish in the past decade. He also said that Microsoft is working on tools for nonprogrammers, especially analytical tools.

Microsoft's Getting Serious About Modeling

He also noted that Microsoft Research is helping the company look into how to improve the whole meeting process — meeting scheduling, coordination, documentation and archiving.

"Meetings waste lots of time," Gates told summit attendees. But he added that Microsoft has a number of developments up its sleeve to help improve the meeting process that it will be making available in products within two to five years.

Gates noted that that Microsoft is "moving the database into the center of the system" and focusing on building schema types for different devices and user scenarios. At the crux of Longhorn will be the datastore that Microsoft is building into its SQL Server "Yukon" database. He also noted that Microsoft is counting on simpler and more intuitive user interfaces to hide the increasing complexity created by this type of model from business and consumer customers.

Gates said that it is "still ridiculous" that automatic roaming isn't built into systems yet. But he said the ability for users to be able to access their files, documents and data seamlessly, wherever it is located, will be standard by the time the next version of Windows ships.

Microsoft announced last week that the company plans to plow $6.9 billion into research and development in fiscal 2004. Microsoft currently is sponsoring 250 PhD interns at its various research facilities worldwide, plus another 915 undergraduate interns across the company.

Gates said during a question-and-answer session with summit attendees that the company is holding onto its hefty cash pile in part to be able to make long-term research investments like it continues to do. "We may have to modify it (the company's policy) somewhat," he joked.

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Microsoft execs said last week at the analyst meeting that the company is holding onto its $62.7 billion in cash and investments primarily to hedge its bets against adverse outcomes of the myriad lawsuits in which it is embroiled.