This article points out an interesting fact about product pricing, saying it's "an easy sell at $54 a user [...] That’s almost disposable money, and was an easy pitch to most managers." but "$539 [...] is now a difficult to justify expenditure, requiring vendor comparisons, and negotiations with middle managers."

All the Basecampish web apps have this competitive edge, making it easy to justify the small investment and simple to subscribe.

Couldn't agree more. In a company of any size getting a product costing over $100 or so is going to attract attention of middle managers who will put a stop to it.

I think the 37 Signals blog (or at least someone on my blogroll) mentioned that was a target of their software - cheap enough that a product evangelist can convince his or her boss to try it out without an entire tendering process ... You just can't compete with Borland's salespeople :-s

It seems like all decent xml suites are in the few to several hundred dollar range...

Unfortunate because I just needed a small subset of their functionality ( a wysiwyg xslt editor )

"Maybe XMLSpy is developed in a poorly insulated aircraft hangar in Siberia, and thus is strongly impacted by the price of oil?" Certainly LOL-worthy.