Google’s approach to speeding up the web, explained by Kimsall below, is in stark contrast to Microsoft’s approach to trying to dominate the web 12 years ago. Google’s approach can cut pageload times about in half, and can really help large and complicated sites that make a lot of requests. There’s already a proof-of-concept SPDY module for Apache. You can read the whitepaper on SPDY for details.
The interesting thing to me was the difference between when MS owned the client and server experience (for sites that mattered to me) and now that Google does (for sites that matter to me). MS seemed to go for more lock-in – pushing ActiveX as a browser technology, pushing IIS as the server of choice, etc. Google, on the other hand, investigates, tests, and promotes new technology to reduce load times and HTTP overhead for the whole internet.