Google Says Desktops Will Be Irrelevant in 3 Years

Google’s VP of online sales and operations has made the bold statement that in three years time desktop computers will be irrelevant.

Speaking at UCD in Dublin yesterday, Google Chief John Herlihy said that smartphones enhance Google’s mission to make information universal, adding that in Japan, more research is being done on cell phones than on PCs. Herlihy predicted that soon smartphones will be the center of it all.

“Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible,” he said. “Because there’s more information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that’s why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models – ubiquity first, revenue later.”

Herlihy’s statements have caused quite a stir in the tech world. There are those who wholeheartedly agree but Silicon Republic, who first reported the story, says that audience members were baffled. Indeed it’s hard to imagine office cubicles without desktops and even harder to imagine laptops meeting the needs of hardcore PC gamers.

But, whether you agree with his sentiments or not, it is clear the direction Google is taking as a company. Silicon Republic reports that, not too long ago, CEO Eric Schmidt told an audience at the Mobile World Congress that the company was working on products from a ‘mobile first’ prospective.

“Every recent product announcement we have made – and of course we have a desktop version – is being made from the point of view of it being used on a high-performance mobile phone on all the browsers that are available,” SR cites Schmidt as saying. “Now the programmers want to work on those apps for mobile that you can’t get on a desktop – applications that are personal and location-aware.”

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