Mashable

Stan Schroeder

Speaking at the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, European Director of Google’s online sales John Herlihy said that Google is mostly oriented towards mobile devices, claiming they’ll become more important than desktop PCs.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” he said.

True, with Android and Nexus One Google has shown a commitment to extend its dominance from the online world to the mobile world. But will desktop PCs really become irrelevant? Depends on how you look at it. Google isn’t really interested in how we edit our photos; it’s interested in where we store them, and increasingly, we do that at a place is a part of their domain — the cloud.

And if your data moves to the cloud, and most of your daily online activities are done on devices such as the Nexus One and the iPad, where simple, widget-style applications cater to your precise needs, then yes, desktop PCs as we know them now will become a lot less important. On the other hand, not many users are ready to ditch the desktop just yet; we’ll see if it all pans out according to Google’s plans.