I used to have a terminal and still work with some of Bloomberg's data products. A big part of their value proposition isn't so much the functionality of the terminal (though it's really extensive, and they keep adding stuff over time) but the breadth of data you can get through it. Not all of it is easily available and/or indexed elsewhere – I've heard Bloomberg literally has teams of people that hand-enter some of the more esoteric stuff. They also do things like create/maintain their own synthetic bond indexes fed from proprietary valuation models. Would take a ton of time/money to EEE all that.

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.

Thanks, very interesting stuff indeed.

> it should be vulnerable to microsoft’s EEE

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.

It doesn't have to be MS who EEE's the Bloomberg terminal, does it?

It's extendable, and Bloomberg programming APIs and its Excel API are both heavily used.

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.