
How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant - sew
http://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-bloomberg-terminal?cmpid
======
raldi
One of the most interesting things about the Bloomberg terminal that never
seems to get mentioned in all the coverage and commenting is that its UI is
optimized for users who actually take the time to go through training.

In particular, everything is designed so that you never have to touch the
mouse. If there are 20 choices onscreen, they'll all be numbered, and you type
the number of the choice you want and press enter. This allows for incredibly
fast interaction, but with a bit of a learning curve. And customers take the
time to learn, because their peers and their boss emphasize how valuable that
investment of time will be.

If the terminal were being introduced today, without that existing body of
zealots to preach the value of getting over the initial learning curve,
there's no way Bloomnberg could get away with it. The sales team would visit a
potential customer, the customer's eyes would boggle at the UI, and Sales
would come back to the office demanding a redesign that looks like Microsoft
Office and is mouse-centric.

~~~
scrumper
Well, the Terminal's UI when introduced in the early 1980s was cutting edge,
but that meant text mode and keyboards - no GUIs or mice back then.

If being launched today, just like back then, it'd be designed to provide both
as shallow as possible a learning curve for new users and power and speed for
experts. In the 1980s that meant full-screen UI with numeric menus, Go codes,
and custom hardware; today, that'd mean a discoverable point-and-click self-
teaching GUI for the newbies, backed up by keyboard shortcuts, scripting, and
a command bar for power users.

~~~
theseatoms
> discoverable point-and-click self-teaching GUI for the newbies, backed up by
> keyboard shortcuts, scripting, and a command bar for power users.

Much like Excel.

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chollida1
The Bloomberg terminal is awesome! By now its been iterated to a point where
it's like the Microsoft Office of Finance. It does everything and there is no
way for one person to understand everything it can do.

It also has the nice lock in feature of the 20% of features that each person
needs is different. This is probably the biggest reason why no one is yet
encroaching on their territory.

it you trade debt, it has your yield curves

If you trade currencies it has your currency rate matrix.

Back office, you've got PORT and MARS for portfolio and risk management.

Developer, you've got the Bloomberg API that allows you to pull real time
quotes for any exchange in the world.

And if you are stuck they do something that seems inconceivable to startups
today, they have actual people you can talk to that help you figure out how to
solve your problem!

One other often overlooked benefit of the terminal is that Bloomberg unlocked
it via Bloomberg Anywhere. This means you can install the Bloomberg terminal
software on any machine you want and then login to use it so that you aren't
locked to a particular machine unlike the old Bloomberg Terminals.

The downside of this is that you can only be logged in at one place at a time,
but pretty much everyone uses this setup nowadays.

And there is IB the Bloomberg instant messenger, just by typing in a name you
can talk to anyone else with a terminal, which is pretty much anyone you'd
want to in finance.

IB is also a sneaky way for recruiters to find out who they should be
contacting:)

~~~
lujim
It better be awesome for $24,000 per year per terminal (last I checked) ;)

~~~
gclaramunt
that's peanuts compared to the cost of NOT having the terminal

~~~
lujim
True, but it's 24k a year because it's the industry standard in the same way a
TI-84 is 100 bucks in 2015.

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apaprocki
There are some of us HNers that develop the Terminal software/infrastructure
(or used to)... so if there's ever anything you were dying to ask, AMAA. :)

~~~
Kluny
I see the API is open source:
[http://static.bloomberglabs.com/api/java/doc/3.8/](http://static.bloomberglabs.com/api/java/doc/3.8/)

Could you set up your own stock dashboard or application with just that API,
or do you need to subscribe to get database access as well?

~~~
apaprocki
The API requires a subscription. The API SDK was open-source licensed so that
either open-source or proprietary applications could include it in their
distribution so that they can consume Bloomberg data "out of the box".

An example is OpenGamma --
[http://www.opengamma.com/](http://www.opengamma.com/) \-- it is an open-
source app that ships with the BLPAPI and if you run it on the same PC as your
Bloomberg Terminal install, it will just work and pull data from the Terminal
API end-point.

The incentive is for apps to support Terminals / Bloomberg data natively from
the get-go and it makes it easier for these startups/smaller players/open-
source apps to have a chance of selling into firms without lengthy custom
development efforts to adapt other data sources.

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bombtrack
FiveThirtyEight's "What's the Point" podcast recently had an episode mostly
devoted to the Bloomberg Terminal. I found it fascinating. I would have never
known it had its own sections/apps/services for travel booking, classified
ads, chat, etc. It would be so fun to poke around at one in real life.

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/podcast-wall-streets-
just...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/podcast-wall-streets-just-one-big-
bloomberg-chat/) \- Bloomberg Terminal discussion starts around 5:30.

~~~
whatok
If you're in New York, I'm pretty sure the library has a few terminals.

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bane
Outside of Wall Street, or rather non-U.S. financial industries, do they also
use Bloomberg Terminals for their markets or do they use something home grown
or nothing at all?

What's the value advantage that a network like this gives to the U.S. vs.
other places?

~~~
apaprocki
The Terminal is used around the world and is localized into 11 languages. News
content is provided in something like 40+ languages.

edit: Also very important is native speaker tech/analytic support in all major
customer languages.

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craigching
Dup, most relevant previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10341334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10341334)

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yeureka
As someone who recently joined the firm to develop software for the terminal I
find it heartwarming that it is so well regarded in the HN community. I did
struggle a lot with the UI initially though I hear that most of users are
hardcore about keeping it as it is.

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chmielewski
[http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rblpapi.html](http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rblpapi.html)

