I believe this author is arguing for web services of a specific kind. He says that products like productivity tools represent an investment to the potential consumer: 'buy me now, for a high upfront cost, and I will help you become more productive (aka help you make more money) in the future'. And this makes people more willing to pay huge amounts for 37signals products.
Edit: whether this is true I am not sure - I've reread the article a couple of times, and he doesn't really make a watertight argument for his case. Are there counter-examples to this? Or conditions where this is simply not true? His argument relies on the fact that 37signals 'charge a lot', and that this high price is not translatable to other web services. But there's no way to quantify that. And there's no reason to assume that there aren't other reasons for such willingness to pay. Off the top of my head: people pay more because 37signals is a strong, trustworthy brand. People pay more because this is B2B, and business have to tend to buy things only at a certain (high) price. People pay more because they have large teams, and 37signals's tiered pricing forces them to use the more expensive packages.
Edit: whether this is true I am not sure - I've reread the article a couple of times, and he doesn't really make a watertight argument for his case. Are there counter-examples to this? Or conditions where this is simply not true? His argument relies on the fact that 37signals 'charge a lot', and that this high price is not translatable to other web services. But there's no way to quantify that. And there's no reason to assume that there aren't other reasons for such willingness to pay. Off the top of my head: people pay more because 37signals is a strong, trustworthy brand. People pay more because this is B2B, and business have to tend to buy things only at a certain (high) price. People pay more because they have large teams, and 37signals's tiered pricing forces them to use the more expensive packages.