That's the biggest issue with their growth right now. Salesforce has done a great job in marketing that it can "do anything"... provided you can build it yourself and get around all the developer platform limitations. I used to do Salesforce consulting and custom development, won their hackathon in 2009, worked with many companies on internal tools and apps and am so happy to be out of that game now.
Who were your typical Salesforce consulting and custom development clients? I may be wrong, but I would think that if you have enough money to spend on customisation for an app that doesn't even belong to you, it may be cheaper and more efficient in the long run to commission a custom built solution.
