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I asked the finance guys at the asset management firm I worked at last, and they said that the #1 value to them was in the chat. So many deals are arranged via

by blunte 10y ago

I asked the finance guys at the asset management firm I worked at last, and they said that the #1 value to them was in the chat. So many deals are arranged via the built-in chat system. News can be acquired from many places, but if you capture the communication (or create the platform, as BB did), then you capture your audience. It's very hard to break out of that, because doing so means you're now excluded from some of the most useful and important information. Nobody wants to be first to leave, and convincing enough users to leave en masse to create or use an alternative seems impossible at this point.

isubkhankulov 10y ago
Bloomberg is also aggressive in retaining customers. A few years back, there was a scandal where Bloomberg News reporters used Terminal data to see that a target of their news story had not logged in for a bit and wrote about it. Since this was breach of trust between the two parts of Bloomberg, many of the banks starting looking into alternatives for BBG chat, and Bloomberg responded by offering the banks (their existing customers) many discounted terminals. Which seemed to have worked since the scandal died down and their chat is still the leader in wall street communication.
- areyousure 10y ago
  In case anyone else was curious about this scandal, I found the following contemporary article writing about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/bloomberg-admits-terminal-snooping.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/bloomberg-a... According to https://qz.com/83445/what-bloomberg-employees-can-see-when-they-snoop-on-customers/ https://qz.com/83445/what-bloomberg-employees-can-see-when-t... , all Bloomberg employees could see when a user last logged in (like "w" in Unix), transcripts of all chats between the user and customer service (these chats are triggered by pressing F1/HELP twice, as other comments have indicated), and how many times the user used specific functions over the last 30 days.

by blunte 10y ago

isubkhankulov 10y ago

Bloomberg is also aggressive in retaining customers. A few years back, there was a scandal where Bloomberg News reporters used Terminal data to see that a target of their news story had not logged in for a bit and wrote about it. Since this was breach of trust between the two parts of Bloomberg, many of the banks starting looking into alternatives for BBG chat, and Bloomberg responded by offering the banks (their existing customers) many discounted terminals. Which seemed to have worked since the scandal died down and their chat is still the leader in wall street communication.

areyousure 10y ago
In case anyone else was curious about this scandal, I found the following contemporary article writing about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/bloomberg-admits-terminal-snooping.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/bloomberg-a... According to https://qz.com/83445/what-bloomberg-employees-can-see-when-they-snoop-on-customers/ https://qz.com/83445/what-bloomberg-employees-can-see-when-t... , all Bloomberg employees could see when a user last logged in (like "w" in Unix), transcripts of all chats between the user and customer service (these chats are triggered by pressing F1/HELP twice, as other comments have indicated), and how many times the user used specific functions over the last 30 days.