Mobile sites are more beneficial to B2C then B2B. Nowadays I do believe they are a necessity, as mobile searches will/have overtaken desktop searches, but I don't yet believe all B2B
need a mobile-friendly site, but should definitely be looking into responsive designs.
Converting a site to be responsive can be done relatively quickly through a grid framework such as
SimpleGrid. Link the CSS file, add the relevant class tags to your content and you
should have a site that adapts for different screens. However, this isn't true optimisation for mobile, and may not please Google enough to avoid penalisation.
Whilst I'm all for web standards, I worry that Google enforcing things like this will up the elitism of the industry to a point where work and the sheer enjoyment of it is taken away from the average Joe. The growth of the web design industry has rocketed in the last 10–12 years since I became interested in it as a lad, to the point where it's no longer geeks happily coding away table layouts in their bedrooms, and is now a full-on professional industry.
Evolution is inevitable but in a way it almost feels as though something is about to be taken away from me for good. I make a decent living as a designer/reluctant developer, often coding up simple sites but I'm the first to admit they're probably not 100% perfect in terms of standards and semantics. But then the clients don't have the budgets to hire a developer to spend a week "doing things properly", they just need a site online, that works and is responsive. If overnight my knowledge is suddenly deemed "not good enough"and sites I code are penalised, then that's surely going to have a negative effect on future business.
Coding up a site is relatively simple once you get going, but the real bulk of the work comes from testing on different browsers/devices, etc, and that's something most small business won't or simply can't afford, especially when they're paying developer rates.
I'm probably just overreacting, but I think it's important to remember just how much control Google has, and indeed how much more control they could probably take, over how the internet should look and work.