Are you getting a failing grade ?

One clear Google philosophy is that "form" never comes before function, and that FAST is king over nearly all other UI design requirements.   If you want to grade your site performance and optimization levels quickly and easily, just load up the Yahoo "YSlow" add-on to Firebug in Firefox and you can now go around grading any site you like.   It make's great suggestions for optimizing, or for which of your web developers to fire.

To quote the master performance expert Steve Souders

THE PERFORMANCE GOLDEN RULE:  80%-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end.  Start there.

Below I have compared both the Microsoft homepage and the google homepage.   Notice that Microsoft nearly flunks out entirely when it comes to optimization.   Its worth noting though, that when I ran the same  test against the Microsoft Bing homepage, it got an "A".