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In a conversation at Google's I/O developer event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Brin pointed out how software gets twice as slow every 18 months — an effect he named 'Page's Law', after his partner Larry Page and in an ironic reversal of Moore's Law. Brin committed Google to bucking this trend: "I want to break this law. I want to make software increasingly fast," he told an audience of reporters.

Brin, whose company launched the ambitious Google Wave collaboration platform a day after his remarks, looked back at how things have changed for web-application development since the early days of Google. Describing the development of Gmail as a web application, he discussed the internal debate inside the company about building it as a JavaScript application, and the arguments about whether it was even possible. Now he thinks the debate is over, and the web-development model is becoming dominant.

"Clearly browsers have been improving, and programming models have improved too. Nobody asks today 'Can you have this on the web?' But we still have a long way to go, particularly in respect to performance," he said.