Gates said he believes that as chips reach gigahertz speed limits, the need for "parallelism" becomes more important. The environment he sketched out imagines desktop supercomputers linked to more powerful clusters in a heterogeneous environment.

"Microsoft wants to play a role here -- to be a participant and work with partners to see how our software fits in these solutions," said Gates. "These solutions will often be extremely heterogeneous." Making certain that all these systems work together "is just one element on how software can do a better job," he added.

Gates also said that Microsoft is reaching out to more supercomputing centers to understand "what should we be doing with our software, how can it connect up to the other software that they have in a better way?"

Martin Gasthuber, a researcher at DESY (Deutsche Elektronen-Synchrotron), a high-energy physics laboratory for basic science research in Hamburg, Germany, was unimpressed. He said Gates' talk was about marketing Microsoft products. "For me, it's not a vision; it's the next step he wants to do -- which is coherent with the next generation of products he has in mind," said Gasthuber, a researcher at the facility who is working on storage issues.

But Ted Dodds, CIO for the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said Gates offered "a very accurate description of current trends in technology and likely future possibilities."