Joel is using a tool called "exaggeration" in this piece to make it more poignant and funny. You might have heard of that ;-)

Seriously though: many of those software licenses are still below say $5000 per license/head/..., and they are very standardized run of the mill software. The article still holds: if you're running a dev shop on MS technology, you won't need manager approval and a sales process to buy Visual Studio or MS SQL, and the same goes for MS Office or Adobe products in a design company.

I'm familiar with the tool, and I enjoy it tremendously. In this case, however, I think we're dealing with the sometimes hard to distinguish "spouting nonsense" tool. :-)

After a certain price point (say 10,000 for CAD packages and the like, where you're actually paying for some seriously specialized and advanced software) it's no longer about the software, it's about the customization. That's what those overpriced sales people come to talk to you about. Not only that, but once they're done you'll get and army of project managers and senior devs that come to visit you to figure out exactly what it is you need and by the time these people are done and all their salaries are paid, yes, you'll have paid somewhere upwards of 75,000 dollars but it's not a piece of software you've bought, it's custom development tailoring a specific package to your exact (hopefully) needs.