If you look at the Platform as a Service space, a lot of development work is done automatically. For example, upload a spreadsheet and the data persistence layer is inferred from the data itself, no need to manually create the tables, the pojos, etc. Just drag and drop.

On top of that, all the security is built in. Email notifications, built in. All this in addition to the scalability of the cloud infrastructure. No need to build in clustering, failover, etc -- all handled automagically.