音乐教育对拉里•佩奇的影响

    苹果公司（Apple）的已故首席执行官史蒂夫•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。

    “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。”

    当谷歌的首席执行官拉里•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。

    “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。”

    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。

    “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。”

    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•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）。”

    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.

    “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.”

    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.

    “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.”

    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.

    “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.”

    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).”