音乐教育对拉里•佩奇的影响

    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。

    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。

    “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。”

    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。

    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。

    “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。

    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。（财富中文网）

    翻译：早稻米

    审：李翔

    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.

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

    “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.”

    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.

    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.

    “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.

    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.