In the not-too-distant future, PCs and devices will become more like assistants, not just technological tools. Increasingly powerful systems of computers, fed by vast networks of sensors, will take advantage of new methods of programming to help scientists make more meaningful discoveries about some of the world's biggest problems. And we'll interact with machines in ways more suited to how our bodies naturally work.

Those, in a nutshell, were the big takeaways from a full day of briefings hosted yesterday by Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, on the company's Redmond campus. I was part of a small group of reporters and bloggers who took part in the sessions, which included a preview of the company's TechFest research science fair. Mundie also encapsulates his thoughts in this Microsoft video, which is definitely worth watching if you're interested in this stuff.

Apart from an entertaining debate between Mundie and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington over the proper roles of cloud and client computing, there weren't a lot of questions yesterday challenging what amounted to the company's vision for the future of the world. However, there were plenty of questions about whether Microsoft can move fast enough to ensure a central place for itself in that world.

Regular readers of TechFlash will be familiar with this discussion. Microsoft over the years has made a habit of showing off new technologies and approaches coming out of its research labs -- TechFest being a prime example -- and then letting competitors beat it to market with products that implement those approaches.

So why does that happen? At the end of one morning session, Mundie took some time to address the question in a level of detail that I can't remember anyone from the company providing in the past.

Craig Mundie

"For us, there’s always a balancing act between how fast you can bring these things to market and what the market demands from us when we bring them," he said. "Everything we do, people expect to ship literally almost simultaneously in most countries of the world. We release everything in 38 languages. That gets harder as you move away from just having to translate the file-print command to something that’s more complex."

Mundie continued, "We’ve always felt it was important to have control of these technologies, but often times it’s frustrating for us, too, when people who have fewer constraints on them — either corporately or in terms of the global marketplace — they say, well, I can make a product out of that before you can. Indeed, in almost every case, they can. But when you look at how they become pervasive in society, I think Microsoft is usually present at the time when they really start to get to scale. We’ll hope to be able to do that here, too."

As an example, he cited Project Natal, the company's upcoming motion-sensitive vision-based control system for its Xbox 360 console. It would have been much easier, and faster, for Microsoft to launch Natal in a limited geographic area, with a single game that took advantage of the technology. Instead, the company has been working to launch the device broadly, with accompanying games from a variety of developers.

"We design and operate ecosystems over time, and that’s what creates value," he said. "It’s been a big part of why we get business over a sustained period of time, and it’s what people expect. But it is much harder to do that than to have one vertically integrated product stack."

That makes sense, but these are the questions I was contemplating on the way home: Why is the company putting so much weight on its shoulders all the time? Is Microsoft too often aiming for too much? I wonder what would happen if the company would start looking for more opportunities to just bowl people over, ecosystems be damned.