Really don't see an ala carte solution being worth it for most firms unless they're really trying to cut down on cost. Integrating and maintaining separate services alone is going to require additional developers. Cost associated with that coupled with quality of service and reliability (outside of this situation) of Bloomberg's current offering makes it a very tough sale. Also, guys who have been using terminals for years are really not going to want to switch.

I'm more thinking "if someone was to compete with Bloomberg how would they even come close to what they offer" may not be practical in reality!

interesting view - what makes Bloomberg brilliant (aside from the support) is that i have, for example, an array of my portfolios that i can access from every function. So if you could create a service that took all of the information that was relevant to you (portfolios, news feeds, models etc) and normalize it to make it interoperable with a whole host of 3rd party systems, you could be on to something!