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.
All of this makes me think the real value for many of a Bloomberg terminal is level 0 access to the insider trading club.
(Yes, I'm a cynical person. No, I'm not saying everyone who has a Bloomberg terminal is doing insider trading.)
That would make it a grey-area if it’s information that will eventually be made public within an hour. I guess it depends on the type of trades you perform...
The finance writer Matt Levine writes on this topic somewhat frequently, I scrounged up an example.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...
Insider trading is complicated in the US because it is a creature of the executive branch and the courts. Congress largely quiet on exactly what constitutes it, and the regulator learning to leverage broad fraud statutes and a few wins in the court, alongside many losses.
There are many funds that base their entire existence on doing private research about companies and making trading decisions on this non-public research.
Visceral example: you spot a CEO get fatally run over by a car. You can immediately bet against the company via short selling, options, etc. even though the knowledge of his/her death is definitely non-public at that time.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/matthewzeitlin/why-bank...
It's hard for me to Google this because Bloomberg.com's own articles leave this out and simply refer to it as "a chatroom" not "a Bloomberg terminal chatroom".
Some chat snippets here:
https://www.businessinsider.com/read-the-bloomberg-chats-tha...
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/12/why-was-libor-rate-ri...
> What the complaint makes clear is that it should not have taken five years to bring these charges. The traders effectively handed the Justice Department a slam dunk case by documenting each maneuver to rig the international interest rate benchmark known as Libor via instant messages recorded on a Bloomberg computer terminal.
Do people slide around in their socks or is there some kind of bowling shoes esque system?
IB has been fully monitored by compliance since its inception, so nothing changed there. Whether or not firms have working compliance departments is probably the question you should be asking :)
If you IB a CEO with a Bloomberg account from some university or so, you'll probably have little success getting a reply either.
Given there's already a social appeal to getting a Bloomberg Terminal, why would they invest the development time/dollars? What's their ROI?
If it would cost a tiny, tiny fraction of their revenue to shore up their UI to make it harder for a future competitor to disrupt them, that seems like a worthy use of money.
One thing people fail to realise is while not initially intuitive once you get used to it the Bloomberg UX becomes muscle memory to instantly load (they force all but the smallest customers onto leased lines) exactly the data you wanted in a dense consistent (UX on any remotely popular function is reviewed and guidelines enforced) easy to read form.
But also remember how much it costs and what their clients are willing to spend. It's not for the wider internet.
Doesn’t that benefit the company long term ?
There maybe two distinct markets and Bloomberg can captilize on both perhaps ?
The newer UI could be built as completely new platform “Bloomberg lite“ targeted towards say folks who can only pay 10,000 USD per year or only say currency traders or whatever ?
If interest starts tilting in the favour of newer version you can slowly add features to near parity while moving the older version even more expensive bracket and getting the newer version closer to old pricing ?
If enough people don’t want the new one you try again something different in a couple of years , until you get it right .
For years their major customers tried to force them into offering an Instant Bloomberg (IM) only license because senior traders insisted their PAs had it. It was only after several senior banks (whenever a single bank had tried the top talent threatened to quit) forced their users to use symphony that Bloomberg relented.
If there is enough interest on the new product you add features to new version and start hiking the price of both so relative price difference remains similar. There will not be a negative impact on revenue in that approach
You could grow the new product in a different direction completely for whole new user who are ready to pay 10,000 but not 25,000. The 25k terminal is still aspirational and exclusive as it is now, if the premise that people are paying for the exclusive network is true both products can work on their own and 10k community can feed into 25k on, if not well there was never a moat to protect in the first place.
i.e. Paying $25k for an IM system for a PA or some basic trade management functionality for a middle office analyst is ludicrous.
But you're also not going to force the trader bringing in millions to run 5 different systems when he knows Bloomberg can do it all and your competitor would give it to him.
There have been a few newer functions that don't allow accessing everything by number shortcut and they're certainly not the most favourite parts of the terminal.
Despite this, they are sorta doing that.
This despite the fact that new features haven’t been released to the classic version for at least 3 years. Not only are they on a dated UI, they’re missing every single new feature that’s been released for several years (and that’s actually a shit load of features).
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.
To provide a devils advocate to your last point, people could be most likely to respond on keyboards because a keyboard is an cost - efficient option for the majority of potential responders.
However there could be other tech that is more time - efficient. And for someone with an advanced condition such as ALS, it would be extremely inaccurate & inefficient in terms of either cost or time to use a keyboard for any sort of input where a high level of accuracy is required. Whereas a speech-to-text software connected microphone or some other system would be far more efficient in those categories for them.
All this to say that no, simply because one person replies to your post with a keyboard adds not one shred of validity to the vast over-generalization that "the keyboard is the most efficient input device we have".
I shall also now further assert to, in addition to disproving your central claim by counterexample, to have also disproved your ending statement (also by counterexample), by first, disproving your absurdly general central claim, and second, having done so using a keyboard as the input system for my response.
* money to pay for it
* a physical address to ship it to
* not be in a country sanctioned by the US (i'm just assuming)
So you need a shipping address.
(But yes, you at least need a b-unit to get started.)
Which doesn't mean it hasn't changed. A lot of elements see minor improvements over the years. Also, a terminal with enough elements open easily takes up 16GB memory, something that wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago. Bloomberg was the reason we had to equip all machines with at least 32GB to run smoothly.
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. :)
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.
I got the impression that it should be vulnerable to microsoft’s EEE.
And yeah, it's actually pretty extensible. There's a mechanism to create apps for the terminal, though I never really used those. Bloomberg will also sell you a programmatically-accessible data feed of pretty much anything they have, although those can cost well into six figures annually.
It Microsoft Teams is any indicator, I can tell you right now that Microsoft is absolutely unable to disrupt and takeover any well-built product. Teams is the worst Slack ripoff I've ever used. Whatever advantage I gain from being able to chat in real-time is lost by constantly fighting with the tool, the notification noise and the fear of missing something in all that noise and terrible UI, not to mention the slowness when switching screens.
If their attempt at EEE'ing the Terminal is similar then Bloomberg has absolutely nothing to worry about.
The reason why it won't be extinguished is that it combines the UI/API (which is not great) with market data feeds that are hard to replicate (because parts of it are scraped from bloomberg messages or only available on bloomberg), the instant messaging and chatrooms that also benefit from the moat of network effects, as well as a news service and macro data/company events/balance sheet data that integrate with each other and the market data feeds.
You could replace the news service and balance sheet data and some of the data feeds with Reuters Eikon, and the instant chat with Symphony - but they are both subpar products with even weaker UI than Bloomberg.
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.
Or Word, or Windows, or Salesforce, or Zoom, or....
Email is definitely an older electronic social network, only preceded by the telephone, postal mail, and face to face socialization.
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.]