Google is changing the rail tracks

Microsoft's Windows has long dominated the operating system landscape. Some argued that it gave them an unfair advantage. It allowed them to build an Office Suite that exploited the capabilities of the Windows Operating System far quicker than rivals, such as Coral's own suite - which dominated the DOS era. Microsoft's attempts to bundle Internet Explorer into Windows, to again use the operating system to dominate another market, led to an infamous law suit.

HTTP has long been the intermediary language - the protocol - used between web browsers and the websites that served these browsers with web pages. HTTP has some problems. So what do you do if you own both the web browser and the websites that the browser visits? In Google's case, the answer seems to be to create a new language that fixes HTTP's problems.

Google's Chrome browser is now communicating with Google's own websites using a different protocol to HTTP - using a protocol called SPDY instead. As a result, Google websites viewed using Chrome had page load times that are 64% faster than without using Chrome. Google is far from having a law suit on its hands, but as Google Docs, Google's own office suite, improves in quality, Google's rivals may find that improving the web application is not good enough. They may be disadvantaged from even the underlying communication protocol beneath them - the rail tracks.