Will SaaS cause the decline of Microsoft Windows?

TechRepublic's Sanity Check blog has a piece today on the possibility that SaaS (software-as-a-service for those of you who are still using the acronyms from last year) and smartphones (!?) will cause Windows' market share to decline.

I have nothing against Windows, but I see this happening for sure. Vista is an expensive garbled mess, and the complexity of each Windows release continues to grow. Meanwhile, simple smart BlackBerrys, iPhones, and web applications are causing folks to rethink the idea of heavy Windows development.

For a while, though, Windows will continue to dominate, and that's for the reason that TechRepublic identifies: applications. There are so many critical applications written to run on Windows that, like the AS400s of yesteryear, the platform will just refuse to die.

It's pretty fair to say though that much of the innovation in the world of software from here on out won't come from desktop, PC-oriented Windows applications though. Mobility + network makes a whole new ballgame.