Google Exec Says Desktops Irrelevant in Three Years Time

By Geoff Spick | Published Mar 5, 2010

"Go mobile young man" is the cry as a top Googler (news, site) echoes his bosses sentiment on the smartphone being the way forward.

Search on the Move

The Digital Landscapes conference is an Irish event where emerging technologies are promoted to business and some blue-sky thinking gets writ large by the IT industry's bigwigs. At this year's event were directors from HP, Cisco, Facebook and John Herlihy, Vice President of Global Ad Operations for Google.

He made several interesting comments about mobile services and search during his speech, including the smartphone one grabbing all the headlines, "the desktop is doomed".

Ignoring the fact that most knowledge workers will still be sat at some sort of computer in five, even ten years time — you try writing multi-page documents or wrangling a spreadsheet on anything other than a keyboard and big screen — he made some potentially valid points.

Japan Leads the Way

Herlihy pointed out that more research is now done on phones than on computers in Japan. This may be true, and the eastern nation has indeed whole-heartedly grabbed the smartphone. However, cultural differences see the Japanese working insane hours with grim dedication to their company, on heroic commutes with vastly superior network services. Will westerners really follow that same pattern?

One thing he was spot on about is the need for fast and accurate results. With a mobile there's limited alt-tabbing to something else while you wait for an answer — or the room to display dozens of results.

So Google's future aims are to sharpen up results to get the information people need first, because if they don't he is convinced that other companies will — and steal Google's market share.

You can find more detail, including video on the Digital Landscapes event from Ireland's own Silicon Republic site.