A lot of people misunderstand the uses of a Bloomberg Terminal. I'm a former terminal user. Bloomberg introduced one of the first, and certainly the longest-lasting, social networks when it debuted in 1981. It is a social network whose average user earns more than $400k per year. There's not as many of those as there are Facebook users, but they have very specific needs, they are likely to know and need to communicate with many of their peers, and they consider having a Bloomberg Terminal a mark of status. Bloomberg benefits from the ultimate network lockin. If you work in a financial firm and you don't merit a Bloomberg Terminal, no matter how high up you are in HR, then you're not that important to the company. All those folks are messaging each other with their Bloomberg IDs, so they know with each message who's in and who's out.
For those who dislike Bloomberg's UI, guess what, many people within Bloomberg do, too. But over the decades, their users have learned how to get to their favorite screens by navigating through a pseudo-CLI, and those users do not want to learn something new. Anyone who has ever tried to build a tooling company of any sort knows how hard it is to ask people to swap out one set of tools for another. Your ideal UI for Bloomberg runs directly counter to the deepest desires of their historical clients. Mastering the useless difficulty of that UI, too, means you are part of the in group.
Finally, Bloomberg has set peoples' expectations across work spaces, and it offers many financial firms a standard tooling. Trader X used a Bloomberg Terminal at Firm Y, well, she'll get up to speed quickly with us because we also use it.
[edited to recognize the author understands the social network side of Bloomberg terminals, in line with comment below.]
> A lot of people, including the author of this piece, misunderstand the uses of a Bloomberg Terminal.
The author says: "[The terminal] is basically an exclusive club of approximately 325,000 people whose employers think they are worth at least $25,000 per year above their base salary."
I think Bloomberg chat is much less important as a social network these days. It's heavily monitored by compliance departments and any communication that diverges from direct market trading is generally frowned upon.
What if Bloomberg made a "new UI", which you could easily toggle to/from, for the benefit of the people who don't like the current UI? Over time the number of people who use the current UI would become a smaller and smaller share of their customer base, and in like, 30 years, they could turn the old UI off.
Instead of trying to "kill" the Bloomberg Terminal, it seems like a more rational choice, assuming success is the model we are trying to follow, would be to replicate it.
I love Bloomberg Terminal's "UI". Really, I think it is the Bloomberg keyboard that enables such hard-to-replace efficiency. Perhaps one can draw analogy to the APL keyboard. The keyboard is still the most efficient input device we have. That is, I think, what is so difficult to "kill". Keyboard-driven computer use still works more efficently than the alternatives.
Anyone who replies to this comment using a keyboard is proving this point.
Are there certain requirements to get an account beyond just having 25k/year to pay for it? Let's say I wanted to get myself this Terminal and money wasn't an issue, would I be able to get one or are there other requirements?
That gave me idea for luxury high income people social network, call it “luxuria”.
Only by invitation, no free email provider to signup, $999 monthly fee and credit score check upon registration with minimum 801 score to get accepted. After that enjoy unlimited access to social feed of your fellow high profile millionaires. :)
> they consider having a Bloomberg Terminal a mark of status
I think this is starting to change. I'm a Bloomberg user and I'm lower status than some of the non-Bloomberg users, such as high level software developers, at my firm.
That is true, but it also misses the point. Even if there is a lot of personal pride in having a Bloomberg terminal, firms would put an end on that in no time if it was not in their best interest. The fact is that Bloomberg has created the perfect legal extortion tool with the terminal. They created a software company that is at the same time a media conglomerate. Every financial company in Wall Street wants to be on the good side of Bloomberg and receive positive or at least non-negative coverage. One way of keeping this going is having a large number of terminals installed.
An interesting side-effect of the social network aspect of Bloomberg is that a lot of middle office employees need to have Bloomberg accounts as well (at least on the sell side) in order to communicate with their clients (they are basically paying 25k/person for a glorified chat app). That was a big driver for the Symphony project (a consortium of sell-side banks getting together and building a federated slack clone).
> those folks are messaging each other with their Bloomberg IDs, so they know with each message who's in and who's out.
This kind of reminds me of network engineers repping their ISP's AS numbers on conference badges and jackets and swag. If you're not one of the persons with full admin access on the core routers of your AS, you're not part of the inner circle.
> but the customer service is incredible. If it breaks or doesn’t do something you need, the company is willing to fix it or build it.
At $20k+ per annum cost I wouldn't expect anything less. That said we Europeans have been asking for non American date format support for years but it's a won't fix. So I guess the fee still isn't large enough.
A big complaint I have is why can't I keep the data I download off the terminal for an exchange if I'm already paying the exchange fees in addition to bloomberg's annual fee? It's like renting data. Also it makes it difficult to switch to a competing product.
Another mild annoyance is the left field approach their reps have about the tech that is visible when they make their regular visits to your office. Your company might have invested in developing data screens ,(outside of Bloomberg) and some months later those views mysteriously become available as new functionality for all users. It's even worse if you use their API; eg, you might write a private back-testing indicator specific to your market and within a day or two it appears in their public indicator list.
The article doesn't mention what I think is the terminals greatest strengths.
1) Emsx, this is a network that every sell side client is on that allows you to trade equities. This means that once 2 guys have a terminal they can trade through anyone that will talk to them.
2) Research tools, every broker has their research setup to be received through the terminal. Research providers can perms ion entire firms or single individuals for their research so no in house tools are needed.
3) user profiles. When you leave your current firm for another one you can keep your bloomberg profile(models, settings, research entitlements, etc). Given how often people move around between firms this makes the terminal very sticky. Without being able to keep your profile and data people would be far less likely to invest in using the terminal
4) They have "compliance tools" that every financial firm is required to have by law.
Need email,IB conversation, even slack archived? They have BVault.
Need real time monitoring of employee chats? They can do that
MIFD 2 regulations? They can help you manage your research to stay compliant.
Need basic portfolio risk reports run? They have PORT<GO> to make compliance happy.
Around 1990 I worked for a company called equinet that was basically the "Bloomberg of Australia".
At the time, the Australian stock exchange (ASX) ran its own sharemarket information service called "Jecnet". It was serial dumb terminals connected over phone lines back to an HP minicomputer/mainframe in Sydney. It was extremely popular amongst professional trading houses and institutional investors.
And the stock exchange decided to get out of the market providing information services, so they announced they were shutting down Jecnet.
So all the stockbrokers and institutional investors around Australia who used Jecnet - and there were alot - were going to lose their service. They would all be forced to move to a new system, away from the one they knew well.
And this guy turned up at equinet - I think he had previously worked for the ASX.
What he had done, is written a DOS Modula2 application which was:
-- a little server application which ran on an 80486DX2
-- it listened on a serial port to the ASX price feed which came in at 9600BPS
-- it had a serial controller card installed with 16 serial ports attached
-- it cached the ASX price feed
And here's the kicker - it pretty much exactly replicated the Jecnet functionality and user interface. (that's my recollection anyway)
So what this guy had done is effectively replace the HP minicomputer with a drop in distributed async server that cloned Jecnet.
So equinet bought/licensed this from him and went to all those Jecnet terminal subscribers and said "you don't need to lose Jecnet, we'll just switch the serial connection from the ASX to us". Brilliant success.
And in time many of those terminal users were transitioned to the much more powerful equinet Windows sharemarket information system.
But it was incredible at the time to see this guy essentially replace the entire functionality of the HP minicomputer system with this thing written to run on a 486.
I have a slightly broader perspective on BBG than most, I think. Firstly, I traded across a load of asset classes. Secondly, I used the APIs to both stream live data and download historical data.
What I seem to see in the comments is that "X is their killer app". But actually you'll find they have loads of X, Y and Z apps. You just think that it's X because most people are in a particular product.
The breadth is quite amazing. No matter what I was trading, BBG had a foot in the door. Want equity analyst data? Check. Want to look at OTC bonds from various banks? Check. CDS indices? Yep. CDS single name? Yep. Want a swaption calculator? Yep, even got vol surfaces for that. What about FX exotics? Sure. Just about anything I touched, BBG would have data or calculators for. Sometimes you found the data might be a bit sparse, but they'd have some upsell for you if you liked.
As for the APIs, there is a lot of digging if you're going to use the data for anything. Finding out exactly how some data column is collected is hard work, they don't make it easy to ask. You do have the upside that almost all data is collected the same way, so you don't spend a lot of time writing several download APIs.
There's also a lot of settings that affect the data that aren't obvious. Well perhaps it's in the documentation somewhere but it definitely helps to have someone around who has seen the quirks.
Speaking of this breadth, a few years ago I looked at Bloomberg's PORT suite of portfolio performance attribution and risk management functions to see what they offered and how programmable it was. On top of the usual extensive help docs, they had 56 white papers totaling ~1400 pages (as of June 2017) explaining the calculations.
> what they often miss is that Bloomberg is a great business because it has low churn, and it has low churn because its IM function is basically an exclusive club of approximately 325,000 people whose employers think they are worth at least $25,000 per year above their base salary.
This is the key insight. They create exclusivity through their high price.
The social network is not nearly as valuable as the article makes out. It is only valuable insofar as the big banks are willing to trust you. If Societe Generale, UBS, Merus Capital, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, BlackRock, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and JP Morgan all are a little skittish about Bloomberg controlling the platform, they can go somewhere else and tell the traders they have to use it.
The real killer app for Bloomberg is mortgage backed securities. It is data intensive, it is analytically complex and the second largest asset class, with 9 trillion outstanding, and you simply cannot trade them without a Bloomberg terminal.
Symphony is an internal chat, just like Slack. It must provide more controls for very large corporations and store messages forever for financial regulations.
I've seen it rolled out in a large bank to every single employee overnight. The numbers given the article seems underestimated and are certainly misleading without context. It's an enterprise software onboarding 50k users at once, nothing like the usual valley startup.
> the user interface on the Bloomberg Terminal isn’t great, but the customer service is incredible. If it breaks or doesn’t do something you need, the company is willing to fix it or build it.
In other words the best from the customer's perspective.
I fully appreciate your comment, however, from experience, a "successful" software company doesn't necessarily have great APIs. That's only the tip of the iceberg.
There are many other parameters that define a successful company. And I'd even dare to say that most of these companies are not particularly great at designing APIs [0].
Are you talking from a bit of usability or reliability?
Their usability model is based a bit in the past, I agree. It can be a little convoluted and seems oldschool.
However reliability (which obviously matters the most) is the most rock solid API you can ask for. Compare it to anything else on the market. Their nearest competitor Reuters is kind of a joke compared to Bloomberg. Reuters is easier to use but it's not 100% reliable. Markets can stop streaming you data and you have no way of knowing etc.
I think this is only surprising for some people because the tech growth-adoption mentality of the last couple of decades needed and benefited from UI that became increasingly optimized for 'ease of use', for 'everyone', for universality.
But bloomberg terminals do not need to be massively adopted. You don't need more (less specialized) terminal operators. That market/user-base didn't need to grow as much as excel users, browser user or CRM users.
As we reach peak digital tools/process adoptions I expect more and more specialized tools that don't try to be 'easy to use' first.
> Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg's current "complex" interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.
Relevant to the conversation here are all the old comments on Hacker News about prior articles on the Bloomberg terminal, like "Ask HN: What's so great about the Bloomberg Terminal" [1]
If designers tried to design Bloomberg Terminal today, it would be a bloated javascript app that takes way too fucking long, the information density would be 1/10th of what you can fit on a screen, giant fonts, unnecessary animations and stripe-like-polish, large buttons, scroll jacking and hiding most important controls unless you hover the mouse over a region (read: undiscoverable), and it would have gradients somewhere with a sticky top menu.
We've totally regressed. We've lost it. We've become enamored with aesthetics.
Btw, it would also be available as an electron app on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms. And it will automatically update behind the scenes, who gives a fuck about your ability to control updates for a $25k/year business critical software.
> Dating sites, for example, are unstable because the most attractive prospects pair off, lowering the quality of the remaining user base until the site can’t recruit new users.
My company effectively (yet loosely) competes with BBG in a small insignificant corner of the fixed income universe (asset backed securities).
My observations:
1- BBG is now part of a banks (and most large trading firms) infrastructure. BBG vCons are the standard way to confirm trades, its chat is one of three tools approved by banks, it has all the APIs to monitor every piece of communication, etc
2- BBG has proprietary data sets no one can get or on terms no one else will ever receive (Eg CUSIP).
3- I think that if the CUSIP license were more open and affordable, we would see many more competitive products. Instead S&P effectively has a monopoly. CUSIPS are the foundation of any alternative. The reality is you need many millions to get that feed and must charge hundreds to each customer. Few can do that
4- I think the idea of BBG as a social network is way over valued. It’s convenient yes but if you have inventory other people want in fixed income you’ll get the look. Every trader I know uses telephone and Outlook. It’s a moat but not the biggest in my opinion.
5- BBG does A LOT. I believe that a given user typically uses some small fraction of a % of functionality (like 2-3%), eg Chat + news + 2-3 pages. I think if one were to compete against Bloomberg, one would have to focus on not being everything (like Money.net or Eikon which isn’t working) but isolating key verticals and building a comprehensive alternative for that space. Going up against all tools everywhere globally feels like a fools errand.
For example, there is a site called Artemis for catastrophe bonds. Everyone serious in that market I’m sure has a BBG terminal and yet everyone also actively visits the site which is run by one guy.
I agree on the key verticals approach as being the best bet. Perhaps the best way to dip your cup into the raging river of Bloomberg cash flow is to take a page out of the Stripe/Twilio book and focus on API first, with phenomenal Excel and Python interfaces, docs and examples. Just forget about a terminal-like UI, or any UI at all and build the tools that make it easier for other people to build their own niche apps. Money.net, Sentieo, YCharts, Koyfin -- my observation is that these all treat the programmability of their data and analytics as a secondary focus, or not a focus at all. It would be nice to see someone come along and do it the other way round.
There's an app called Symphony which is trying (with some success) to take over the chat aspect from Bloomberg. Their killer feature is privacy - not from your institution's compliance dept, but from Bloomberg. Bloomberg's journalists could snoop traders activity on the platform. Understandably banks and traders hate that and so have funded and pushed Symphony instead.
Another reason is it takes months of negotiations and 5 figure $$ sums per month to get leased lines in to the various exchange networks across the globe. Every exchange also has its own protocol, or variation of a common protocol, connectivity quirks, market model, data quality and normalisation issues etc. etc. Maintaining all this is expensive.
A missing piece of this article is a discussion of Bloomberg’s more or less successful competitors today: Refinitiv, Factset, Alphasense, CapIQ, Tradeweb, MarketAxxess, Enverus
1) Its a bit of a cult with its crazy NYC main office
2) Culture is very sales driven (a bit like Oracle) and up or out hiring policies. Smart pricing - like MS Office. They know who and how to charge (for example giving free FIX connections etc). I once had a rep break down crying asking for another terminal subscription otherwise she was going to be fired.
3) The terminal is a bit like vim. Once you memorize the keystrokes you can do anything.
4) Cool biometric 2FA technology with the card
5) A lot of what they have is done better by other companies except the sales and the bundling.
[+] [-] blueyes|5 years ago|reply
For those who dislike Bloomberg's UI, guess what, many people within Bloomberg do, too. But over the decades, their users have learned how to get to their favorite screens by navigating through a pseudo-CLI, and those users do not want to learn something new. Anyone who has ever tried to build a tooling company of any sort knows how hard it is to ask people to swap out one set of tools for another. Your ideal UI for Bloomberg runs directly counter to the deepest desires of their historical clients. Mastering the useless difficulty of that UI, too, means you are part of the in group.
Finally, Bloomberg has set peoples' expectations across work spaces, and it offers many financial firms a standard tooling. Trader X used a Bloomberg Terminal at Firm Y, well, she'll get up to speed quickly with us because we also use it.
[edited to recognize the author understands the social network side of Bloomberg terminals, in line with comment below.]
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
The author says: "[The terminal] is basically an exclusive club of approximately 325,000 people whose employers think they are worth at least $25,000 per year above their base salary."
So I don't think they missed the point.
[+] [-] bsdz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Uehreka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwdisswordfish2|5 years ago|reply
I love Bloomberg Terminal's "UI". Really, I think it is the Bloomberg keyboard that enables such hard-to-replace efficiency. Perhaps one can draw analogy to the APL keyboard. The keyboard is still the most efficient input device we have. That is, I think, what is so difficult to "kill". Keyboard-driven computer use still works more efficently than the alternatives.
Anyone who replies to this comment using a keyboard is proving this point.
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|5 years ago|reply
Only by invitation, no free email provider to signup, $999 monthly fee and credit score check upon registration with minimum 801 score to get accepted. After that enjoy unlimited access to social feed of your fellow high profile millionaires. :)
[+] [-] divbzero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vostok|5 years ago|reply
I think this is starting to change. I'm a Bloomberg user and I'm lower status than some of the non-Bloomberg users, such as high level software developers, at my firm.
[+] [-] coliveira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|5 years ago|reply
I got the impression that it should be vulnerable to microsoft’s EEE.
[+] [-] infinite8s|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
This kind of reminds me of network engineers repping their ISP's AS numbers on conference badges and jackets and swag. If you're not one of the persons with full admin access on the core routers of your AS, you're not part of the inner circle.
[+] [-] snarf21|5 years ago|reply
Or Word, or Windows, or Salesforce, or Zoom, or....
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bane|5 years ago|reply
Email is definitely an older electronic social network, only preceded by the telephone, postal mail, and face to face socialization.
[+] [-] bsdz|5 years ago|reply
At $20k+ per annum cost I wouldn't expect anything less. That said we Europeans have been asking for non American date format support for years but it's a won't fix. So I guess the fee still isn't large enough.
A big complaint I have is why can't I keep the data I download off the terminal for an exchange if I'm already paying the exchange fees in addition to bloomberg's annual fee? It's like renting data. Also it makes it difficult to switch to a competing product.
Another mild annoyance is the left field approach their reps have about the tech that is visible when they make their regular visits to your office. Your company might have invested in developing data screens ,(outside of Bloomberg) and some months later those views mysteriously become available as new functionality for all users. It's even worse if you use their API; eg, you might write a private back-testing indicator specific to your market and within a day or two it appears in their public indicator list.
[+] [-] chollida1|5 years ago|reply
1) Emsx, this is a network that every sell side client is on that allows you to trade equities. This means that once 2 guys have a terminal they can trade through anyone that will talk to them.
2) Research tools, every broker has their research setup to be received through the terminal. Research providers can perms ion entire firms or single individuals for their research so no in house tools are needed.
3) user profiles. When you leave your current firm for another one you can keep your bloomberg profile(models, settings, research entitlements, etc). Given how often people move around between firms this makes the terminal very sticky. Without being able to keep your profile and data people would be far less likely to invest in using the terminal
4) They have "compliance tools" that every financial firm is required to have by law.
Need email,IB conversation, even slack archived? They have BVault.
Need real time monitoring of employee chats? They can do that
MIFD 2 regulations? They can help you manage your research to stay compliant.
Need basic portfolio risk reports run? They have PORT<GO> to make compliance happy.
[+] [-] andrewstuart|5 years ago|reply
At the time, the Australian stock exchange (ASX) ran its own sharemarket information service called "Jecnet". It was serial dumb terminals connected over phone lines back to an HP minicomputer/mainframe in Sydney. It was extremely popular amongst professional trading houses and institutional investors.
And the stock exchange decided to get out of the market providing information services, so they announced they were shutting down Jecnet.
So all the stockbrokers and institutional investors around Australia who used Jecnet - and there were alot - were going to lose their service. They would all be forced to move to a new system, away from the one they knew well.
And this guy turned up at equinet - I think he had previously worked for the ASX.
What he had done, is written a DOS Modula2 application which was:
-- a little server application which ran on an 80486DX2
-- it listened on a serial port to the ASX price feed which came in at 9600BPS
-- it had a serial controller card installed with 16 serial ports attached
-- it cached the ASX price feed
And here's the kicker - it pretty much exactly replicated the Jecnet functionality and user interface. (that's my recollection anyway)
So what this guy had done is effectively replace the HP minicomputer with a drop in distributed async server that cloned Jecnet.
So equinet bought/licensed this from him and went to all those Jecnet terminal subscribers and said "you don't need to lose Jecnet, we'll just switch the serial connection from the ASX to us". Brilliant success.
And in time many of those terminal users were transitioned to the much more powerful equinet Windows sharemarket information system.
But it was incredible at the time to see this guy essentially replace the entire functionality of the HP minicomputer system with this thing written to run on a 486.
[+] [-] exikyut|5 years ago|reply
Is there anything more out there I can read about the history?
[+] [-] dcl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|5 years ago|reply
What I seem to see in the comments is that "X is their killer app". But actually you'll find they have loads of X, Y and Z apps. You just think that it's X because most people are in a particular product.
The breadth is quite amazing. No matter what I was trading, BBG had a foot in the door. Want equity analyst data? Check. Want to look at OTC bonds from various banks? Check. CDS indices? Yep. CDS single name? Yep. Want a swaption calculator? Yep, even got vol surfaces for that. What about FX exotics? Sure. Just about anything I touched, BBG would have data or calculators for. Sometimes you found the data might be a bit sparse, but they'd have some upsell for you if you liked.
As for the APIs, there is a lot of digging if you're going to use the data for anything. Finding out exactly how some data column is collected is hard work, they don't make it easy to ask. You do have the upside that almost all data is collected the same way, so you don't spend a lot of time writing several download APIs.
There's also a lot of settings that affect the data that aren't obvious. Well perhaps it's in the documentation somewhere but it definitely helps to have someone around who has seen the quirks.
[+] [-] clausok|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antb123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
This is the key insight. They create exclusivity through their high price.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JackFr|5 years ago|reply
The social network is not nearly as valuable as the article makes out. It is only valuable insofar as the big banks are willing to trust you. If Societe Generale, UBS, Merus Capital, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, BlackRock, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and JP Morgan all are a little skittish about Bloomberg controlling the platform, they can go somewhere else and tell the traders they have to use it.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/symphony-a-messaging-app-t...
The real killer app for Bloomberg is mortgage backed securities. It is data intensive, it is analytically complex and the second largest asset class, with 9 trillion outstanding, and you simply cannot trade them without a Bloomberg terminal.
[+] [-] user5994461|5 years ago|reply
I've seen it rolled out in a large bank to every single employee overnight. The numbers given the article seems underestimated and are certainly misleading without context. It's an enterprise software onboarding 50k users at once, nothing like the usual valley startup.
[+] [-] MagnumOpus|5 years ago|reply
I guarantee you that 98% of the users paying loadsamoney for Bloomberg have never and will never trade or analyse MBSs.
I agree with you on the IM - it's one of the lock-in factors but would have been killed by Symphony if it were even close to the largest one.
[+] [-] throwanem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easytiger|5 years ago|reply
If you were a developer working with their API based feeds you wouldn't be saying that
[+] [-] scandox|5 years ago|reply
In other words the best from the customer's perspective.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|5 years ago|reply
There are many other parameters that define a successful company. And I'd even dare to say that most of these companies are not particularly great at designing APIs [0].
[0]: https://www.oracle.com/middleware/technologies/api-manager.h...
[+] [-] mrlala|5 years ago|reply
Their usability model is based a bit in the past, I agree. It can be a little convoluted and seems oldschool.
However reliability (which obviously matters the most) is the most rock solid API you can ask for. Compare it to anything else on the market. Their nearest competitor Reuters is kind of a joke compared to Bloomberg. Reuters is easier to use but it's not 100% reliable. Markets can stop streaming you data and you have no way of knowing etc.
Bloomberg is SOLID and you get what you pay for.
[+] [-] tifadg1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 627467|5 years ago|reply
But bloomberg terminals do not need to be massively adopted. You don't need more (less specialized) terminal operators. That market/user-base didn't need to grow as much as excel users, browser user or CRM users.
As we reach peak digital tools/process adoptions I expect more and more specialized tools that don't try to be 'easy to use' first.
[+] [-] tdeck|5 years ago|reply
https://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-makeover
> Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg's current "complex" interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.
[+] [-] taude|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13736009
[+] [-] fermienrico|5 years ago|reply
We've totally regressed. We've lost it. We've become enamored with aesthetics.
Btw, it would also be available as an electron app on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms. And it will automatically update behind the scenes, who gives a fuck about your ability to control updates for a $25k/year business critical software.
[+] [-] ElectronShak|5 years ago|reply
I chuckled at this line.
[+] [-] lefstathiou|5 years ago|reply
My observations:
1- BBG is now part of a banks (and most large trading firms) infrastructure. BBG vCons are the standard way to confirm trades, its chat is one of three tools approved by banks, it has all the APIs to monitor every piece of communication, etc
2- BBG has proprietary data sets no one can get or on terms no one else will ever receive (Eg CUSIP).
3- I think that if the CUSIP license were more open and affordable, we would see many more competitive products. Instead S&P effectively has a monopoly. CUSIPS are the foundation of any alternative. The reality is you need many millions to get that feed and must charge hundreds to each customer. Few can do that
4- I think the idea of BBG as a social network is way over valued. It’s convenient yes but if you have inventory other people want in fixed income you’ll get the look. Every trader I know uses telephone and Outlook. It’s a moat but not the biggest in my opinion.
5- BBG does A LOT. I believe that a given user typically uses some small fraction of a % of functionality (like 2-3%), eg Chat + news + 2-3 pages. I think if one were to compete against Bloomberg, one would have to focus on not being everything (like Money.net or Eikon which isn’t working) but isolating key verticals and building a comprehensive alternative for that space. Going up against all tools everywhere globally feels like a fools errand.
For example, there is a site called Artemis for catastrophe bonds. Everyone serious in that market I’m sure has a BBG terminal and yet everyone also actively visits the site which is run by one guy.
[+] [-] clausok|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twic|5 years ago|reply
Their software is a shitshow, for developers and end users. Their data curation is often lacklustre. But none of that matters.
[+] [-] fancyfredbot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nly|5 years ago|reply
Market data is an expensive game to get in to.
[+] [-] bradj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haecceity|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antb123|5 years ago|reply
1) Its a bit of a cult with its crazy NYC main office
2) Culture is very sales driven (a bit like Oracle) and up or out hiring policies. Smart pricing - like MS Office. They know who and how to charge (for example giving free FIX connections etc). I once had a rep break down crying asking for another terminal subscription otherwise she was going to be fired.
3) The terminal is a bit like vim. Once you memorize the keystrokes you can do anything.
4) Cool biometric 2FA technology with the card
5) A lot of what they have is done better by other companies except the sales and the bundling.