音乐教育对拉里佩奇的影响

Steve Jobs, the late Apple CEO, famously said that a course in calligraphy he dropped in on at Reed College instilled in him an aesthetic that inspired the typefaces and fonts of the original Macintosh computer and eventually those of the entire PC industry.

苹果公司（Apple）的已故首席执行官史蒂夫o乔布斯曾说过一段广为人知的话：他在母校里德学院（Reed College）时旁听过一门书法课，从中学到的一些美学知识启发了他在第一代Macintosh电脑中采用多种字型和字体，并最终为整个个人电脑行业采纳。

“If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts,” Jobs said during a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. “And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.” Jobs went on to say that it didn’t become apparent until much later how that single course impacted the “wonderful typography” of personal computers. “Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college,” he said. “But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.”

“假如我从未旁听过这门课，Mac电脑绝不会拥有多种字型或按比例间隔的字体。”乔布斯在2005年斯坦福大学（Stanford University）毕业典礼演讲中表示，“而且，自微软Windows模仿Mac之后，可能每一台个人电脑都有了这种字体界面。”乔布斯说，直到很久之后，他才意识到那一门书法课对于个人电脑“丰富多彩的版面式样”有着多么大的影响。“当然，我上大学时是不可能把未来的这些点串起来的。”他说，“但在十年后回顾这一切时，所有这一切都一目了然。”

As Google CEO Larry Page looks backward, he’s realizing how much his musical education inspired critical elements of Google—especially his impatience and obsession with speed.

当谷歌的首席执行官拉里o佩奇回顾过去时，他意识到他受到的音乐教育，特别是他对于速度的迫切和执迷，在造就谷歌的核心元素方面发挥了重要作用。

“In some sense I feel like music training lead to the high-speed legacy of Google for me,” Page said during a recent interview with Fortune. “In music you’re very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing.”

“从某种程度上，我感觉音乐训练造就了谷歌的高速传统。”最近佩奇在接受《财富》（Fortune）杂志采访时表示，“在音乐中，你需要对时间有非常清晰的认知。时间基本上是最重要的东西。”

Page, who grew up in Michigan, played saxophone and studied music composition while growing up. During college at the University of Michigan, he developed a business plan for a company that would use software to build a music synthesizer. That project, which required the software to work in real time, opened his eyes to a what he saw as a flaw in the software that powers most computers.

佩奇在密西根州长大，演奏萨克斯，并学习了作曲。在密歇根大学（University of Michigan）上学时，他为一家利用软件来制造音乐合成器的公司制定了一份商业计划书。在这个要求软件实时工作的项目中，他惊奇地发现了一个他认为大多数电脑软件都存在的缺陷。

“It’s amazing to the extent I think that modern operating systems are terrible at being real-time,” Page said. “If you think about it from a music point of view, if you’re a percussionist, you hit something, it’s got to happen in milliseconds, fractions of a second.”

“这太让人惊讶了，我发现现代操作系统在实时表现方面相当糟糕。”佩奇说，“如果你从音乐角度考虑，假如你是一位打击乐演奏者，你敲击一下后，声音要在几毫秒后才会发出。”

Page’s speed obsession was baked into Google GOOG -0.28% from day one. Page believed, and later measured, that the faster Google’s Search engine returned answers, the more it would be used. He fretted over milliseconds and pushed his engineers—from those who developed algorithms to those who built data centers—to think about lag times. He kept Google’s home page famously spare in its design because it would help the document load faster. To this day, atop the search results page, Google tells users how long it took to find answers to a query. Search for “Larry Page and speed” and above the first link you may see “About 21,100,000 results (0.47 seconds).”

从谷歌成立的第一天起，佩奇对于速度的执迷便渗透到了公司之中。佩奇坚信，如果谷歌搜索引擎返回搜索结果的速度越快，其使用频率就越高。他随后对此进行了测量。由于不满意毫秒级的反馈速度，佩奇对工程师们（包括开发算法和构建数据中心的工程师）施压，要求他们考虑延迟时间。他维持了谷歌首页非常著名的空白设计，因为这可以帮助文件更快地加载。直至今日，在搜索结果页面顶端，谷歌仍然会告诉用户，它用多少时间找到了搜索结果。搜索“Larry Page and speed”（拉里o佩奇和速度），在第一个搜索结果的链接上方，你会看到“约21,100,000条结果（用时0.47秒）。”

During product demos, Page is known to count in his head and complain if he thinks a product is slow. When Google developed the Chrome web browser, it was optimized for speed. And Page’s focus on speed had an impact well beyond Google itself. In 2010, Google began taking into account the loading speed of a website when it ranked in search results. That pushed web masters around the world to work on optimizing their pages for speed.

在产品演示时，大家都知道佩奇会默默计时，如果他认为一款产品速度太慢，就会抱怨。谷歌在开发Chrome网络浏览器时对其进行了速度优化。佩奇对于速度的关注所带来的影响已远远超出了谷歌自身。2010年，谷歌在对搜索结果排序时开始考虑网站的加载速度。这迫使全世界的网站管理员对网页加载速度进行优化。

The whole Internet may be faster because of him, but that doesn’t mean Page is satisfied.

因为他的缘故，整个互联网可能都变快了，但这并不意味着佩奇就会满足。

“It’s amazing to the extent to what software developers kind of get lazy, and they’re okay with things taking a while,” Page said. “But it’s really not okay.” After a short chuckle, Page added: ”People can process information really quickly. And if your phone is sluggish or whatever, it’s a huge problem.”

“看到软件开发人员懒散的程度让人感到惊讶不已，他们觉得，软件运转需要一些时间没什么大不了的。”佩奇说，“但这的确是不能容忍的。”他笑了笑说，“人们能非常快地处理信息。如果你的电话性能不佳或有其他问题，就是一个大问题。”

Page may have not relaxed his exacting demands for products to work in real time. But since he took over as CEO in 2011, he began insisting that Google focus on another critical element that was also inspired by his music education: beauty.

如今，佩奇可能还没有放松要求产品实时工作的苛求。但自从2011年他接任公司首席执行官后，他开始坚持让谷歌注重另一项核心要素：美学。这也是音乐教育给予他的启迪。

Page determined that beautiful design and speed no longer needed to be at odds, and he pushed his engineers and product managers to focus a new, unified, and more elegant design, for all of Google’s web products. The initial effort, internally called Project Kennedy, first focused on Google’s search page, and later touched virtually every other Google service. Since then, visual design has become an integral part of the development process, especially on mobile.

佩奇相信美学设计与速度并不矛盾，他敦促工程师和产品经理为谷歌所有的网络产品推出全新统一的、更为优雅的设计。谷歌内部将这一项目称为肯尼迪项目（Project Kennedy），一开始以谷歌的搜索页面为主，后来几乎涉及到了谷歌其他所有服务。自此以后，视觉设计已成为开发流程一个不可或缺的部分，特别是移动应用。

“I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do,” he said. “As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.” Page says he learned to appreciate that “artistic component,” in part through music.

“我认为，艺术是我们所做工作的一项重要组件。”他说，“作为一家科技公司，我一直在努力强调这一点。”佩奇说，他学会欣赏“艺术组件”一定程度上是因为音乐的缘故。

Now, Page’s interest in music has taken a new turn. How it will impact Google, if at all, remains to be seen. “The last couple of years I’ve been trying to learn percussion a bit, which has been challenging,” he said.

如今，佩奇对音乐的兴趣转向了新的领域。至于会为谷歌带来什么样的影响，仍有待观察（如有影响）。“近几年我在努力学习一点打击乐，这很具挑战性”，他说道。