Google's European sales chief John Herlihy seems to have gone ahead of himself this time around. The ad sales boss told an audience in Dublin yesterday that “smartphones are on their way to replacing desktop computers”.

"In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant", Herlihy said to a “baffled” audience at an Irish technology conference, further adding, “In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs”.

Herlihy emphasized that “Google's number one concern is now the mobile market”, echoing the same thing that Eric Schmidt said at last month's Mobile World Conference in Barcelona.

“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”, said Herlihy.

Sharing his views about the reasons why is Google as successful as it is, Herlihy stated that it is “because of its relentless brutality and execution, its determination to hire the best people, and its decision to celebrate failure”.

He explained it metaphorically, “The Roman legions used to send out scouts in different directions”.

"If a scout didn’t return, the army didn’t head in that direction. We seek feedback at every opportunity on something – we either kill it, adjust it or redeploy resources”.

“When we build something we strive for ubiquity in usage and adoption. That helps us understand how customers react and then we build a revenue model”.