In another sign that change is coming to the world of computing, Google’s John Herlihy says:
In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.
Herlihy is based in Europe and obviously has never seen a Japanese PC keyboard. But three years?
The digital world is fundamentally different to the traditional business world. Things happen much faster, websites spring up from nowhere, a video could be a YouTube hit in hours.
I wonder what that has to do with desktop computers? Also, I note that the digital world is merely a subset of the so-called ‘traditional business world.’
At the end of the day it’s the customer who owns the cash. That’s why we construct our organisation to deliver value. The underlying framework is to make it easier for people to do business, solve problems and move on.
Google’s customers are advertisers. Over 99-percent of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Google, so far, is a one-trick pony. A wealthy one-trick pony with a desire to disrupt the technology landscape.
For example, Microsoft and Apple create and sell mobile operating systems; the former directly to cell phone manufacturers, the latter on Apple products. Google’s Android mobile device operating system is given away free.
That’s disruptive.
Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible. 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.
Money quote: “ubiquity first, revenue later.”
That’s easy to say for a company with very deep pockets and a dominant market share on the cash cow product—advertising. In reality, Google remains a one-trick pony, self-annointed king of the internet advertising industry.
Meanwhile, computing—apps, games, utilities, connectivity—is moving from the desktop to mobile devices, but it’s an embrace, a dance of change, rather than a death knell for desktops.