
How the Bloomberg terminal made history - diegolo
http://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-bloomberg-terminal#
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jsherry
Surprised this article mentioned chat only once. The secret sauce to
Bloomberg's stickiness is their collaboration features via what's know as
Instant Bloomberg.

Here's an article about a bunch of banks actually working together to unseat
Bloomberg's chat: [http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/21/banks-back-rival-to-
bloomberg...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/21/banks-back-rival-to-bloomberg-
messaging-system.html)

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uptown
I've got a Symphony account. It's okay I guess, but Bloomberg has the network
effect, and that's a very difficult thing to overcome because for at least
some period of time you'll be asking people to use multiple communication
platforms, at which point, some of them will just revert to their original
platform.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
I would have to guess once Symphony is proven some of the banks will strongly
encourage/require communication with their traders to go through Symphony. or
it might be another failed Bloomberg-killer. Will be interesting.

I don't think the first commercial Bloomberg terminal was in 1982, but I could
be wrong. Michael Bloomberg was still at Salomon until mid-1981. Maybe there
was a prototype sometime in 1982. Merrill didn't invest until 1983 and that's
where the early terminal got all the bond data. I don't think it was a big
factor in the market until like 88-ish, Salomon launched their Yield Book
project to compete around 1988-89. There was some kind of an exclusive with
Merrill and/or bad blood with Salomon and they couldn't even buy a terminal.

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mastazi
"Most [job candidates] don’t know a lot about us" That's a disgrace, as a geek
I would love to put my hands on a Bloomberg Terminal! Although at $24,000 per
year, it won't be any time soon I guess :-)

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Animats
What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes
is available free.

It's not that complicated. The hard part is making sense of all that numeric
information. There are a number of fixed-layout screens you can pull up to
follow entire markets broadly, and those come up with one or two hot-key
presses. Then, there are standard analyses for individual ticker symbols.
There's a news story system. There's a way to load up an Excel spreadsheet and
run that, using live Bloomberg data. (Underneath, it's a Windows PC.) Those
spreadsheets are typically pre-built by staff at trading firms, specialized
for whatever they're doing. The number of keystrokes needed for most queries
is very small.

One of the minor Bloomberg features is something like Craigslist, but for rich
people. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing.

If you push the Help button twice, you get text chat to Bloomberg's help desk.

~~~
JackFr
> What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes
> is available free.

While that's true for stocks and key rates, Bloomberg is all about bonds, and
there is really no competition there. And it's not only the market data that's
important. Bloomberg provides reference and indicative data on hundreds of
thousands (millions?) of fixed income instruments.

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osullivj
Yep, and those bond (and swap) prices are not public prices in the same way as
equity prices from exchanges. They're indicative dealer quotes. ALLQ shows a
stack of dealer quotes. No other system does this...

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HiLo
Eh, you're a bit off. You can find compiled quotes in lots of places, and
individual quotes from any broker or dealer, so there are other systems that
do this (maybe none that have exactly ALLQs same dealers giving quotes). But
you're right saying that many times these prices are indicative quotes from
dealers.

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lquist
One of the first (and largest) SaaS companies!

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gaadd33
Wouldn't it be more like HaaS? Hardware as a service? Since they sell the
terminals not just the software?

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whatok
Most install the software on their own hardware. Definitely wasn't the case
back in the day hence the moniker "terminal" for the desktop software.

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HiLo
Mostly correct, most financial and commodity institutions I've visited make
heavy use of their (extremely expensive) keyboards.

~~~
whatok
Yeah, I was strictly talking about the software. Keyboard is sort of essential
for operation.

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open-source-ux
Here's an interesting alternative viewpoint about the Bloomberg terminal
interface published in 2010.

[http://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-
makeover](http://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-makeover)

From the article:

 _" 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 more painful the UI is, the more
satisfied these users are.

The Bloomberg Terminal interface looks terrible, but it allows traders and
other users to pretend you need to be experienced and knowledgeable to use
it."_

Dare I suggest that this tendency to keep software unnecessarily complex is
something quite common, particularly in the open source community where
attempts to improve ease-of-use are often met with resistance and claims of
'dumbing down'?

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JackFr
To someone proficient on a Bloomberg terminal, it's like emacs or vim. Your
hands never leave the keyboard.

Would you call emacs unnecessarily complex?

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jzelinskie
Sure, but there are also an awful lot of developers using Sublime for good
reason.

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headcanon
There's a lot of people using yahoo stocks as well.

