Google executive: 'Desktops will be irrelevant in three years'

Google's prediction jumps on an obvious trend - but the implications betray the company's growing hubris

It's likely that you don't know a lot about John Herlihy, the head of global advertising operations for Google. He's not a publicly-recognised figure in the same way as Eric Schmidt, Larry Page or Sergey Brin, and - like many vice-presidents at big corporations - he doesn't get a great deal of time in the limelight.
But he is certainly basking in it today, after a series of comments - reported by Silicon Republic - caused a stir around the web.
"In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant," he told an audience at University College Dublin. "In Japan, most research is done today on smartphones, not PCs."
"Mobile makes the world's information universally accessible. Because there's 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."
Various camps reacted in a mixture of ways. Desktops? Irrelevant? What? What does this tell us about Google? What does it tell us about the future? What, oh, what does it all mean?
The truth is, he's right.
It's been obvious for a very long time that the traditional desktop computer is going to become an artifact of history, at least outside offices and hardcore nerds. Laptops and netbooks have become much more important parts of the computer market, and the volume of powerful mobile phones continues to rocket. The writing has been on the wall for desktop PCs for a long time.
Three years may be pushing it, but in fact, this development is so obvious that stating it in such fist-pumping terms borders on the inane. It's as if he stood yelling "Communism is a bankrupt philosophy!" a decade after the Berlin Wall fell.
Perhaps I'm being a little harsh - but the point stands.
Despite that, though, there are other interesting twists in what he said that are worth examining more closely.
First off, there's the fact that he's toeing the party line. In many ways, Herlihy was echoing the comments made by Eric Schmidt at Mobile World Congress a couple of weeks ago, when he said the company was moving to a "mobile first" strategy. "Culturally it is time to figure out a way to say yes to the emergent new services and ideas that will not come from Google but from those literally millions of companies and programming shops that will be built on this new platform," he said. "Now is the time for all of us to get behind it. What I would suggest to you here, right now, at Mobile World Congress is to understand that
the new rule is 'mobile first'; mobile first in everything.. it's time for us to make mobile first the right answer."
So what we're hearing is the mobile drumbeat from Google. They want us - and their rivals - to know that they're serious.
Secondly, there's the fact that this mobile drumbeat conflicts with everything that Google is doing in the PC business. If the desktop is irrelevant, what does that mean for its Chrome operating system? For its web browser? For all the people relying on its desktop business?
Google doesn't have a great track record of keeping products alive once they're outside of its target area... so should the users - and developers - attached to those systems be worried?
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, there's a level of hubris in all this that leaves me more than a little concerned.
The implication of Herlihy's words is not simply that there will be "new opportunities for new entrepreneurs". The coded message is that there will be new opportunities for Google. And with $24bn in the bank and an acquisitive hunger that seems insatiable, you wouldn't bet against them trying to dominate these new markets just as they do search.
Indeed, Herlihy also said that Google's culture is based on "relentless brutality and execution" - the kind of warning to rivals that is not easy to miss (it's worth reading our extract from Ken Auletta's book on Google for more insight here, too).
Thanks to the European commission and the US regulators, we're already seeing a few chickens starting to look at their watches and think about heading home.
When you've grown up in a culture of "don't be evil", it's easy to see everything you do in a positive light. But if you're in Google's path, the conflict between these two images - a quirky web business and a relentless machine - is hard to overcome. Perhaps Steve Ballmer wasn't so out of step earlier this week when he said Google's success was largely the product of incumbency, not culture.
Ballmer's probably in a better place to judge, since he will recognise the attitude of making sweeping pronouncements about the future while simultaneously intimating that you are that future - because it's precisely what his company did while it watched its in-built advantages slip away. To me, Google's language today sounds eerily reminiscent of Microsoft at its peak.
So, there's little doubt in my mind that desktops will be irrelevant sooner rather than later. But the bigger question is whether Google making that sort of statement sounds like the dawn of an empire, or the end of one?