Back in the late 1990s, when XML was still in its formative years (a state some would argue continues to this day), XML Spy was a very welcome entrant to the developer tools market, bringing intuitive, GUI-based schema and basic transformation authoring and validation to the developer’s desktop.

While some were productive and happy with just the W3C specs and a copy of emacs, many of us only used XML intermittently, building an export, import or transformation that simply worked, promptly forgetting all of the nuances of DTDs versus XSDs versus XDRs, or the quickly changing XSL(T) specifications.

It was a great step forward in the uptake and quality of XML utilization to have such an easy to use, up-to-date tool.

At the time XML Spy was basically shareware, offering a fully featured 30-day trial, at worst popping up the occasional “please register me!” exhortation.

Many just registered it: it was an easy sell at $54 a user, less if you bought multiple copies. That’s almost disposable money, and was an easy pitch to most managers. It was easy enough saying “let’s get a copy for everyone in the group. Even for the guy in the cube near the washroom, anti-XML rage bursting from his trembling lips in a spray of spittle and phlegm.”

Time goes on and we all moved to different projects, divisions and companies, often with long gaps needing little or no in-depth XML. When those instances came up, we’d try to find an old licensed copy, or would download the latest trial, using yet another toss away email address for the validation.

And XML Spy just kept getting more expensive. The company grew and grew (note that the domain on the original archive.org link above actually expired, and now sits in the hands of a domain ad purveyor), and the dollar signs in their dreams had them imagining, apparently, of a day when millions of information workers sat toiling their days away in the pure awesomeness of XML Spy. In emacs-esque form, it had grown more and more functionality, even if many users never used it for anything more than creating and validating schemas and transformations.

By late 2000, the price of XML Spy had inflated to $149 a user. By the end of the next year it hit $399 a user. By late 2006 it was up to $499 a user (at some point dropping the space between XML and Spy, becoming XMLSpy).

As I write this it’s up to $539 a user.

Maybe XMLSpy is developed in a poorly insulated aircraft hangar in Siberia, and thus is strongly impacted by the price of oil?

A ten-fold jump in price in about 8 years seems excessive. What was once a wonderfully priced utility is now a considerably expensive development ecosystem. What was once an easy purchase (at one workplace I just paid for it myself rather than deal with the annoyance of a requisition form) is now a difficult to justify expenditure, requiring vendor comparisons, and negotiations with middle managers. When the money handlers are convinced, often it’s just for partial coverage of the development team.

You end up with the “XML guy”, rather than having a team appropriately equipped with a uniform set of tools.

Of course, clearly my complaints are off base. Altova obviously did appropriate research, and they determined that there really are people and groups who’ll happily pay more for an XML editor than they paid for their entire Visual Studio suite.

But come on, Altova – bring back a, err, “Semi-Professional” version – something with XML schema and transformation authoring and validation and nothing more. No grand vision where your product is the center point of a developer’s existence. Put a reasonable price tag on it – like $59 – and I’m sure you’ll get a lot of sales where right now you get none. I realize you probably have lots of big buildings with expensive lights, and layers and layers of bureaucracy to finance, but don’t do it all on the back of a simple little XML utility.