
The Bloomberg Terminal, a Wall Street Fixture, Faces Upstarts - walterbell
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/business/dealbook/the-bloomberg-terminal-a-wall-street-fixture-faces-upstarts.html?_r=0
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holdenc
Calling Bloomberg a tech company is generous. They are a data company, and the
quality and breadth of their data is unmatched. Reproducing this completeness
of their data requires would require agreements with a huge number of data
providers (exchanges for publicly offered securities and over the counter
exotic securities). You also need in-house collection and quality assurance
(for example, some exchanges send bad ticks or bad close prices and these need
manual correcting) for many classes of data that either not publicly provided
(LLP ownership data, M&A league tables, leveraged loan data) or simply needs
follow-on collection (such and IPO from S-1 filing through to pre-market
pricing). While it's possible to chip away at their datasets individually,
creating a product that provides the same thing would be nearly impossible for
a small company.

~~~
apaprocki
We have many, many people that work on data. We also have ballpark 4,000
programmers. If that doesn't make a "tech" company, then what is your
definition?

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lordnacho
As a trader and dev who's used Bloomberg for over a decade:

The only reason Bloomberg chat is used is because all the traders have a
terminal. There's no reason that couldn't be replicated. Heck, they could just
get Slack. It has the main requirement, which is the log is stored
(compliance). You also have group chats and "ring the bell" functions.

The thing Bloomberg gives you that's useful is a way to look at all sorts of
data and pull it out in many formats. Your average trader is an amateur at
coding, but he can still figure out how to pull some data onto his excel
spreadsheet. Once you graduate to a somewhat more robust system, there's a
bunch of APIs in all the popular languages that you can use to pull the data
into your own database (are you supposed to do that? I don't know, but I'll
bet you everyone does it). The data part is a bit harder to dislodge, because
BBG provides a common way to refer to every instrument, and you get used to
the field codes. You also understand what that data means, ie details like
when the data is published, whether the numbers are adjusted for splits, etc.
That would be an annoying and tedious thing to replicate with some other
provider, and could easily cost you more than 20K in salaries to recreate.

Bloomberg is indeed a major overhead. If you get one for every
trader/salesperson, that's quite an overhead on top of that person's salary.
Most people don't event use it enough to justify having their own, but I guess
they'd feel bad if they didn't have one, status being what it is on a trading
floor. When things are going well, you can say "oh it's the commission on a
single trade" (which is true), but when things are bad you might think twice.
In order to pull all the money out of the customers, Bloomberg prevents you
from using RDP into the machine.

~~~
iaskwhy
In my experience, this is not about the chat software (Bloomberg's not that
great at it) but more about the best customer service ever. And that's really
difficult to copy, in particular by startups which usually prefer to forget
about customer service at all...

~~~
lordnacho
The best customer service ever?

If you ask them something mundane like "How do I show dividends for GE?" they
will know.

If you ask anything even slightly technical like "How do I get the API to
adjust the divendends?" you will hit a wall.

The customer service people seem to be there only for the terminal users.

~~~
iaskwhy
Whenever I have issues with their API I just use their API support web page,
not the terminal. In my experience, the terminal support team doesn't know
anything about their APIs. If you are as lucky as I am, you also get to
directly email or call the person responsible for handling all about your
company at Bloomberg. I understand other people might have a different
experience but in my view they are the best custome service I ever used. On
the opposite side I can think of their main competitor, Reuters, and their
awful customer service, in particular the API support team. I always need to
schedule a meeting if I want something done about my support emails. I would
add their APIs quality match their customer support...

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osullivj
Bloomberg runs on 25 million lines of Fortran...

[https://etrading.wordpress.com/2006/06/01/25-million-
lines-o...](https://etrading.wordpress.com/2006/06/01/25-million-lines-of-
fortran/)

The NY Times is right to point out that it's the range of offerings in
Bloomberg that make it so hard to dislodge: news, dealer quotes, market data,
reference data, historical data, email & chat, charting etc. There are many
firms tackling parts of that puzzle, but nobody attempting to do it all.
Bloomberg is a classic platform business; with such strong demand from one
constituency - traders renting terminals - that it can afford to treat other
platform clients with disdain. When I worked for a dealer contributing quotes
to BBG I found them incredibly difficult to work with.

~~~
humanrebar
"June 1, 2006"

~~~
osullivj
The BBG UI certainly hasn't changed since then. They bought in John Lakos
([https://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-
lakos/4/117/888](https://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-lakos/4/117/888)), the
"Large Scale C++" author to help them make the jump to C++ in 2001 and
linkedin says he's still there. Given they have a winning business model, and
the forces of inertia being what they are, I'm betting nothing's changed...

~~~
eli
The UI looks archaic but I wouldn't presume that says anything about how it
works under the hood. There are other forces at work on the UI. See e.g.
[https://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-
makeover](https://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-makeover)

~~~
apaprocki
The UI and the technology it is built on have changed drastically since a
decade ago, but not all changes are cosmetic. Changes to the core UX have to
happen gradually and evolve with users because, as you know, this is an actual
real product used 24/7 and you can't just change everything out from most
users on a Friday when they come back into work the following Monday.

I'm not going to say much about that linked article -- just that it is almost
complete nonsense and wish it would stop being brought up whenever the
software is mentioned.

~~~
eli
Yes, I think we're saying the same thing. And I didn't realize that was a
frequently cited article.

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JauntTrooper
In my last job, I used the Bloomberg terminal on a daily basis. I loved it --
the breadth and reliability of their data is unmatched.

As I see it, the two main weaknesses to the business model an upstart could
use are:

(a) DOS-like UI/UX: though many of their clients take pride in their skills at
navigating the arcane maze of commands to access data (and once you know how
to access the data you need it becomes lightning fast), it's a serious hurdle
to overcome for more casual users. The terminals sat relatively idle in my
office when I first joined because no one went through the trouble to access
them.

They have excellent customer service on call who basically does the work for
you at no further cost if you need it, but that's a very expensive band-aid,
and it's time-consuming. Many of the senior directors at my company preferred
to use Thomson's browser-based data from their desktops to get information
more quickly.

(b) Privacy/secrecy: In May 2013, a few banks, including Goldman, complained
Bloomberg reporters was spying on their traders' activity on the terminals:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/bloomberg-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/bloomberg-
admits-terminal-snooping.html)

Secrecy is paramount to these traders. I'm not surprised they're backing a new
chat feature.

~~~
beagle3
> it's a serious hurdle to overcome for more casual users.

Bloomberg has no casual users at $21k/terminal. And they probably like it that
way.

I'm sure there's a way to make the interface less arcane, but it IS effecive
for regular users, and I suspect that the main complexity problem is in the
data domain, rather than in Bloomberg's specific UX.

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gghh
It says a Bloomberg Terminal costs 21k dollars per year. I was expecting it to
be more expensive, since an on-premises license for Hipchat in a large corp
(5k users) costs 3.5 times as much. Is it 21k $ for how many users?

~~~
Sargrak
21k$ per user and per computer.

~~~
andylynch
per user _or_ per computer (Bloomberg Anywhere or Bloomberg Open). Real-time
data is extra since the exchanges charge more, but 15' delayed to pretty much
everything is included, which goes a very long way.

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valdiorn
That's cute. Good that there are alternatives, but Bloomberg isn't going
anywhere, it forms part of the foundation for half the hedge funds and
investment banks in the world. It's not just a source of data, in many cases,
it is the definitive yardstick to which all other data is measured, to the
point where, if Bloomberg has actual, verifiable errors, people will often
knowingly mangle their data only to match Bloomberg.

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hokkos
Here is the application :
[https://www.money.net/#see](https://www.money.net/#see)

It seems written in Java.

