In three years desktops will be irrelevant - Google sales chief

In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant

No, although I do get the whole wishful thinking thing that corporate execs do to promote their businesses (i.e. when all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail, etc). Will most of the growth be in mobile? Sure, but that's because mobile is largely still in it's infancy and desktop PCs have hit commodity levels. Beyond a faster proc (or more of them), desktops have pretty much hit their plateau. That's why the day of desktops costing more than a few hundred bucks is coming to a quick end. Soon desktop ASPs will hit a few hundred dollars and buying one will be about like buying a new microwave oven. Notebooks will not be far behind. As far as cloud computing goes, Internet connectivity is still way to spotty and unreliable for anything that's truly important. According to the last stats I saw barely half the homes in America even have access to high speed Internet. At the business level, any true enterprise company would be nuts to trust something that had any real value to the cloud. That doesn't mean they won't use cloud computing to a certain degree, but the vast majority will continue to be housed locally for the foreseeable future.

Heh. Google's mission is to monetize search through targeted ad placement revenues. There is nothing altruistic about the services they provide. Each is calculated to provide an information harvesting opportunity, which in turn drives the ad targeting which drives profitability. Bottom line. As long as you don't mind the information being harvested, or do not view it as an unwanted intrusion into your habits and preferences, it's a non-issue. But for some it is yet another erosion of privacy in the public forums of the internet. Perhaps the important question is, does the internet itself simply preclude, or is hostile towards privacy by its very nature?

I don't agree with his synopsis there, the desktop will be important for years for various reasons, not least of which is the fact that the screen and keyboard are a reasonable size. The rest of the article is an interesting insight though, thanks for seeding it here.

There's a form-factor problem. The smallest screen that can do useful work is five inches. That makes for a humungous phone, if today's conventional lay-out is used, with a series of buttons at one end of the screen.

If those "hardware buttons" are moved to the sides of the device, though, a five-inch screen device can be made only slightly large than my old HTC TyTn II.