Yes its a new thing
In the olden days(2+ years ago) you needed 1) boatload of money(servers, colo fees, admins, load balancers, routers, backup systems, data centers etc you name it) 2)business acumen and 3)your sweat to develop reliable apps for a startup. With cloud computing everything has changed. PaaS such as Heroku and Windows Azure now empowers developers to launch app startups inexpensively since CapEx to start one is so lowered to the extent that the developer now needs to be only business Savvy and put in her/his sweat in to the business. No need for that boat load of money and managing infrastructure. In fact these days if you go to VCs or Angels for funding for your new app startup and ask for servers and data centers, they will pull the rug under your feet and kick your butt out of the door and you wouldn't know what hit you on the way out. One can clearly see now that this is the decade of developers but unfortunately few developers will take advantage of this fact to maximize the opportunity at hand.
