[chasd00]

I work for a small consulting company specializing in SF custom development. About 1/3 of our projects are coming in and fixing something other consultants screwed up. It's very expensive and I really feel for the position our clients are in. The governor limits are particularly nasty, you have to be constantly aware because they won't bite you in development since you're usually working on a limited set of data. It's only after a production deployment do they begin to show up and there's nothing you can do.

funny you mention Salesforce as IaaS, a buddy of mine works at one of the big firms and was telling me the other day he's on a project where the client is layering a multi-tenant architecture on top of Salesforce's Community Cloud product and basically reselling communities.