In general we start to see Microsoft products as they are coming out. Super-users - beta testers and community-involved people who attend events and so on - may see products up to a year before. By that time (as I learned today) Rick Rashid and his team are three to ten years past what they probably started.
Rick is senior vice-president who founded and still runs Microsoft Research. Celebrating their fifteenth anniversary, this team has evolved from a handful of far-seeing individuals into a team approaching eight hundred in six sites across three continents.
From what I can tell they do not develop products - they are too advanced for that. Instead they are developing many of the ideas that future technologies will use as their foundation.
Unlike product teams their research is usually public - they publish most of their research for others to use, and this research touches on much more than servers and apps.
In one demo they showed how they are working with NASA and other international space agencies to map space - not the solar system or the galaxy which for the average astronomer is mostly known - rather they zoomed out from Building 33 (Microsoft Conference Center) to galaxies twenty-five million light years away, as mapped by tools such as the Hubble telescope and others.
At another booth I was introduced to a new term - the Body Area Network. A European team (the two researchers I spoke with were Dutch and German) have developed a way to collate data from a heart monitor, blood glucose monitor, and several other biometric sensors (in a watch and other devices) to recommend Insulin injections, and to report data to the diabetic's physician to adjust treatments. Also pregnant women with troubled pregnancies can connect real-time to a nurse who monitors this data to monitor the mother's and the fetus' heart rates, enabling women who otherwise would have been bedridden for months to be out and about.
Windows Vista is cool, and it is now. Microsoft Research is science fiction - ten years forward right in front of you. The future really does look bright!