The price of one license doesn't matter. What matters is the dollar amount of a sell, and I promise most of those products are being sold in the <$1k or >$75k range. The exception is Smart Bear, but they are one of the few "doing it right".

If you are paying list price for those then you are doing it wrong

Sure, but if you get 40% discount on, say, 10K, that's still over 1K.

Adobe and Autodesk too.

While Apple recently modified their bundles and lowered the prices for Final Cut Pro and Logic, they were both within this range and did more or less what Alex described.

Joel's article was written in 2004 so, using gasoline as the benchmark, the 2012 dollars figure is $2180 [1].

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28average+price+of+gas...

Gasoline is a poor choice of benchmark. Energy prices aren't really a proxy for inflation.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=core+inflation+from+200...

> Gasoline is a poor choice of benchmark. Energy prices aren't really a proxy for inflation.

Core inflation is also a poor choice.

My housing costs are fixed, so the variation that I see is in the things that core inflation excludes.

I am not sure that I understand your mention of housing costs. Doesn't core inflation exclude housing costs as well?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_inflation , core inflation excludes food and energy. It does not exclude housing.

SQL Server was in that range for many forms of licenses, and so was Windows Server when I worked at Microsoft. Actually I could think of a lot of software in that range.

Today, I was looking at UBS in South-East Asia..... A basic system may be a bit below $2k, but a functional system is probably about $4-5k.

Also a basic functional system of Sage ERP for smaller businesses is often well above $10k and below $50k

SQL Server was $50k per socket (going to core) for the Enterprise Edition as a list price. The typical SQL Server sale was >$100k, easily. Also, sales were negotiated and Microsoft licensing is totally fluid, especially if an Enterprise Agreement comes into the mix (where the cost is spread out over a few years). People citing MS licenses here are blind to how the majority of MS license in Enterprises get sold--huge deals with multi-year subscriptions that cost lots of money. MS will typically "true up" licenses at the end of an EA.