Google's Eric Schmidt addresses key strategic shift and calls on world to think "Mobile First"

I thought that this quote below from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, at the Mobile World Congress was critically new and interesting in terms of being a piece of evidence that we’ve tipped over from desktop to mobile as the dominant delivery channel:

Earlier Schmidt used his first ever keynote speech at the world’s largest mobile phone trade show to give the industry a call to action, suggesting that telecommunications companies should embrace the new world of smartphones and cloud computing, not fear it.

He said high levels of connectivity and cloud computing – the idea that devices can be made smarter by relying on the computers on the internet to carry out complex tasks such as voice recognition – have brought the industry to a turning point.

“The confluence of these three factors mans something very fundamental is happening. A phone is no longer a phone, it’s your alter-ego,” he said. “It does not think as well as you do, but it has a better memory. It has a more accurate idea of where you are. It can take pictures better than we can remember things.”

He said Google is switching to a ‘mobile first’ model, with more and more developers thinking first about how the applications and services they have created will work on a mobile device.

“Culturally it is time to figure out a way to say yes to the emergent new services and ideas that will not come from Google but from those literally millions of companies and programming shops that will be built on this new platform.”

“Now is the time for all of us to get behind it. What I would suggest to you here, right now, at Mobile World Congress is to understand that the new rule is ‘mobile first’; mobile first in everything.. it’s time for us to make mobile first the right answer.”

I like that phrase: “Mobile First”. I think I’ll use it.