Impressive, how Google are taking on challenges that pretty much no other company could possibly address... replacing email... enhancing HTTP, etc... They're the only company with the means to take on such massive, unprofitable projects, and at the same time enough street cred that everyone won't immediately assume they're trying to make the web proprietary. The fact that they tend to open up these things from the ge…
They are hardly the only company doing this. Microsoft Research do a ton of pretty visionary / far-reaching work, much of which has nothing to do with MS-proprietary platforms. For example, the VL2 architecture for data center networks: http://sns.cs.princeton.edu/2009/10/new-datacenter-networks/