Its funny seeing Salesforce get knocked on here. I've been working with it quite a lot. They deliver two upgrades with new features every year that are deployed in minutes for each customer, and in nearly all cases, previous features and APIs and customer customisations continue to be supported. To be able to extend and extend and extend like that without breaking, their core codebase must be incredibly well engineered. They must have their internal modularity, testing, documentation and design really well figured out.

How many other live applications can you think of that have evolved continuously for over a decade without becoming an unmaintainable mess?

I work with charities and SF offer an automatic 80% discount on everything which makes them a pretty good option. Why bother custom building a CRUD-type database when you can knock it together in Salesforce using (mostly) point and click?

On the downside: too much marketing fluff (Can't google anything to do with Salesforce coding without hitting loads of marketing bollocks), really bad names/constantly changing names for features (Salesforce1 - anyone know what that is yet?), really complicated licensing if you're trying to figure out how to do X+Y with cheapest licences. And the names of the licences keep changing ....

But technically, they must be doing something very right under the hood. And while I'm at it, I like their core API, its basically an ORM.