[that_guy_iain]

I personally think these things have a future, but everyone is just marketing them at the wrong people. They're marketing them wrong, if you look at ecommerce, it's clear there is lots of companies that want to buy instead of build. For the majority of generic companies, it's literally not possible. It's not even possible to build the majority of the tooling/framework/generic business logic. I think projects that target developers as their core market will fail. Developers, even at companies, just don't have the budget to buy these things at the costs it would require to make them sustainable. They don't even have the authority to make such a decision, again look at ecommerce and look who decides what software gets bought and built upon; it's generally not the CTO. It's the CEO and COO. But of course, you need to have a professional level of support to make it worthwhile for the company to buy it. The upselling on this is also reasonably good again as seen by ecommerce and other areas.

Oh and one other thing, I think any solution that isn't as vast as the ecommerce solutions are to ecommerce will also fail. Most of these are generally very small and don't tackle any issues companies will have after the MVP stage.

(Disclosure, I'm working on such an application/business framework.)