For the past 15 years or so, business software has continued to develop - and not much has changed. Clients still expect you to provide firm estimates of overall project costs before performing a rigorous analysis of requirements.
Design tools tend to be bulky and arcane and leave much of the real work to developers.
Development tools are still slow and immature and fail to expose the full power of underlying language engines. With a Web browser as the standard presentation manager, you are severely challenged to create user interfaces that provide effective support and feedback to users of moderately complex applications. Developing a product that will be delivered as a service poses some unique challenges. In particular, capacity planning becomes more challenging, and downtime is intolerable. With a Web-delivered service, the user base is the sum total of all the employees of all the companies that sign up for the service.