音樂教育對拉里佩奇的影響

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.

蘋果公司（Apple）的已故首席執行官史蒂夫o喬布斯曾說過一段廣爲人知的話：他在母校裏德學院（Reed College）時旁聽過一門書法課，從中學到的一些美學知識啓發了他在第一代Macintosh電腦中採用多種字型和字體，並最終爲整個個人電腦行業採納。

“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.”

“假如我從未旁聽過這門課，Mac電腦絕不會擁有多種字型或按比例間隔的字體。”喬布斯在2005年斯坦福大學（Stanford University）畢業典禮演講中表示，“而且，自微軟Windows模仿Mac之後，可能每一臺個人電腦都有了這種字體界面。”喬布斯說，直到很久之後，他才意識到那一門書法課對於個人電腦“豐富多彩的版面式樣”有着多麼大的影響。“當然，我上大學時是不可能把未來的這些點串起來的。”他說，“但在十年後回顧這一切時，所有這一切都一目瞭然。”

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.

當谷歌的首席執行官拉里o佩奇回顧過去時，他意識到他受到的音樂教育，特別是他對於速度的迫切和執迷，在造就谷歌的核心元素方面發揮了重要作用。

“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.”

“從某種程度上，我感覺音樂訓練造就了谷歌的高速傳統。”最近佩奇在接受《財富》（Fortune）雜誌採訪時表示，“在音樂中，你需要對時間有非常清晰的認知。時間基本上是最重要的東西。”

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.

佩奇在密西根州長大，演奏薩克斯，並學習了作曲。在密歇根大學（University of Michigan）上學時，他爲一家利用軟件來製造音樂合成器的公司制定了一份商業計劃書。在這個要求軟件實時工作的項目中，他驚奇地發現了一個他認爲大多數電腦軟件都存在的缺陷。

“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.”

“這太讓人驚訝了，我發現現代操作系統在實時表現方面相當糟糕。”佩奇說，“如果你從音樂角度考慮，假如你是一位打擊樂演奏者，你敲擊一下後，聲音要在幾毫秒後纔會發出。”

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).”

從谷歌成立的第一天起，佩奇對於速度的執迷便滲透到了公司之中。佩奇堅信，如果谷歌搜索引擎返回搜索結果的速度越快，其使用頻率就越高。他隨後對此進行了測量。由於不滿意毫秒級的反饋速度，佩奇對工程師們（包括開發算法和構建數據中心的工程師）施壓，要求他們考慮延遲時間。他維持了谷歌首頁非常著名的空白設計，因爲這可以幫助文件更快地加載。直至今日，在搜索結果頁面頂端，谷歌仍然會告訴用戶，它用多少時間找到了搜索結果。搜索“Larry Page and speed”（拉里o佩奇和速度），在第一個搜索結果的鏈接上方，你會看到“約21,100,000條結果（用時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.

在產品演示時，大家都知道佩奇會默默計時，如果他認爲一款產品速度太慢，就會抱怨。谷歌在開發Chrome網絡瀏覽器時對其進行了速度優化。佩奇對於速度的關注所帶來的影響已遠遠超出了谷歌自身。2010年，谷歌在對搜索結果排序時開始考慮網站的加載速度。這迫使全世界的網站管理員對網頁加載速度進行優化。

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

因爲他的緣故，整個互聯網可能都變快了，但這並不意味着佩奇就會滿足。

“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.”

“看到軟件開發人員懶散的程度讓人感到驚訝不已，他們覺得，軟件運轉需要一些時間沒什麼大不了的。”佩奇說，“但這的確是不能容忍的。”他笑了笑說，“人們能非常快地處理信息。如果你的電話性能不佳或有其他問題，就是一個大問題。”

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，佩奇可能還沒有放鬆要求產品實時工作的苛求。但自從2011年他接任公司首席執行官後，他開始堅持讓谷歌注重另一項核心要素：美學。這也是音樂教育給予他的啓迪。

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.

佩奇相信美學設計與速度並不矛盾，他敦促工程師和產品經理爲谷歌所有的網絡產品推出全新統一的、更爲優雅的設計。谷歌內部將這一項目稱爲肯尼迪項目（Project Kennedy），一開始以谷歌的搜索頁面爲主，後來幾乎涉及到了谷歌其他所有服務。自此以後，視覺設計已成爲開發流程一個不可或缺的部分，特別是移動應用。

“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.

“我認爲，藝術是我們所做工作的一項重要組件。”他說，“作爲一家科技公司，我一直在努力強調這一點。”佩奇說，他學會欣賞“藝術組件”一定程度上是因爲音樂的緣故。

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，佩奇對音樂的興趣轉向了新的領域。至於會爲谷歌帶來什麼樣的影響，仍有待觀察（如有影響）。“近幾年我在努力學習一點打擊樂，這很具挑戰性”，他說道。