A remark that reportedly "baffled" the audience at the Irish technology conference on Wednesday came from none other than Google's European sales head John Herlihy, who said that PCs are on their way to become "irrelevant" in the next three years or so!

According to Silicon Republic, Herlihy told the conference audience in Dublin: "In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs."

A close analysis of Herlihy's remarks underscores the irrelevance of desktops in the sense that they are increasingly being replaced by laptops, which are fast becoming `primary' computers - even in offices.

However, to assume that, three years down the line, smaller platforms like smartphones will handle traditional productivity applications is clearly a far-fetched thought - more so as most of the regular users of desktops or laptops do not find even the netbooks fitting the bill for tasks like writing a report or creating a large spreadsheet.

It is likely that Herlihy's remark about the supposed irrelevance of PCs is an upshot of the fact that Google has shifted its focus to the mobile search arena. As such, the mention about Japan chiefly reflects a growing number of searches on the smartphones; which is, in no way, an indication of that desktops or laptop computers are losing ground - no matter how Herlihy's remark is interpreted!