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A lot of people misunderstand the uses of a Bloomberg Terminal. I'm a former terminal user. Bloomberg introduced one of the first, and certainly the longest-las

A lot of people misunderstand the uses of a Bloomberg Terminal. I'm a former terminal user. Bloomberg introduced one of the first, and certainly the longest-lasting, social networks when it debuted in 1981. It is a social network whose average user earns more than $400k per year. There's not as many of those as there are Facebook users, but they have very specific needs, they are likely to know and need to communicate with many of their peers, and they consider having a Bloomberg Terminal a mark of status. Bloomberg benefits from the ultimate network lockin. If you work in a financial firm and you don't merit a Bloomberg Terminal, no matter how high up you are in HR, then you're not that important to the company. All those folks are messaging each other with their Bloomberg IDs, so they know with each message who's in and who's out. 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.]

jedberg 6y ago
> A lot of people, including the author of this piece, misunderstand the uses of a Bloomberg Terminal. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bitexploder 6y ago
  It probably means they think it is worth 25,000*Factor -- In sales that factor can be quite high, 4, 6 or even 8 as a mark of a good sales person. In other industries it could be lower, but you expect that terminal to produce significantly more than it costs if you are willing to pay for it.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Either way: 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.)
  - kovek 6y ago
    Can you explain an example insider trading situation involving Bloomberg terminals?
    - blueyes 6y ago
      I do not think that Bloomberg terminals are any more useful for insider trading, in the strict sense, than any other communication device, and probably less so because they are more likely to be monitored by one's employer. However, there is one exception: Bloomberg News publishes a lot of scoops about public companies. That is its raison d'être. To move markets. Those Bloomberg scoops are released to terminal subscribers 15-20 minutes before the news hits the rest of the market. So it's a kind of syndication of inside information, obtained by Bloomberg reporters from anonymous sources somehow apprised of the companies that the journalists cover. But Bloomberg doesn't trade. Its clients do. Bloomberg just reports, and there is nothing illegal about that.
      - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
        Isn’t insider trading is defined as trading based on non-public information not available to other shareholders. (So you don’t have to be an actual insider - you could be trading on information you got by dumpster-diving). 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...
        vmception 6y ago
        or 325,000 users counts as broadly disseminated 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.
- appleiigs 6y ago
  I think the idea that a bloomberg terminal is status symbol is not accurate. All it means is that I can save more than $25K in my trades per year by having it, which is a very small hurdle.
  - dx034 6y ago
    I absolutely agree. I had a terminal for most of my career and while it's an amazing piece of software (Reuters offer doesn't come close despite them often having more extensive news and data) and it's super convenient for contacting brokers and banks, I never felt people without it were left out. Especially nowadays, it's not uncommon for brokers to only give traders Bloomberg and Analysts other software to save cost. Doesn't impede their status. Quite the opposite, we always used to say that we'd happily give away terminal access for $25k extra a year. The reason that never happened is because having Bloomberg Access is in the companies' interests, not just the employees' personal interest.
Uehreka 6y ago
What if Bloomberg made a "new UI", which you could easily toggle to/from, for the benefit of the people who don't like the current UI? Over time the number of people who use the current UI would become a smaller and smaller share of their customer base, and in like, 30 years, they could turn the old UI off.
- andechs 6y ago
  Why would they though? If their customer retention is already super high, the only reason to make an onboarding curve more shallow would be to acquire new users. Given there's already a social appeal to getting a Bloomberg Terminal, why would they invest the development time/dollars? What's their ROI?
  - manquer 6y ago
    if you want to hire and retain highly talented folks they would want to work on new tech and product philosophies ? 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 .
    - cbzoiav 6y ago
      The problem with bloomberg lite is many of those users are now paying $10k instead of $25k. 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.
bsdz 6y ago
I think Bloomberg chat is much less important as a social network these days. It's heavily monitored by compliance departments and any communication that diverges from direct market trading is generally frowned upon.
- DanBC 6y ago
  Did that happen after the LIBOR scandal? https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/12/why-was-libor-rate-rigging-committed-over-the-bloomberg-terminal/ 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.
  - bsdz 6y ago
    That was one contributing factor. There have been a lot of high profile scandals and this has led regulators to be far stricter. Eg we're not allowed to have personal phones in the office and must go to special areas in the building to use them. Some organisations confiscate phones (and I hear shoes) on entry; although I think this is more a concern about proprietary information.
    - disconcision 6y ago
      > I hear shoes Do people slide around in their socks or is there some kind of bowling shoes esque system?
      - userbinator 6y ago
        Sandals are common.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    They can just "establish" the network using Bloomberg and actually discuss illegal things off-channel e.g. Signal.
mrtksn 6y ago
Is this thing extendable? I.E. are there tools built around it helping cool kids do even cooler stuff or game the system? I got the impression that it should be vulnerable to microsoft’s EEE.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > 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.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    It doesn't have to be MS who EEE's the Bloomberg terminal, does it?
- joshcain 6y ago
  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.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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divbzero 6y ago
What happens when a Bloomberg user moves to a different firm? Can they bring their Bloomberg ID with them?
- jentist_retol 6y ago
  That's not really that important. What is important is that they have an ID, at all.
- cbzoiav 6y ago
  I was pretty upset when I went from [initial][surname] to [initial][surname]1 after changing jobs.
  - joshcain 6y ago
    Getting [initial][surname] is pretty impressive. My first ID was [initial][surname]7.
    - cbzoiav 6y ago
      My surname is incredibly rare (to the extent i'm probably the only one thats used Bloomberg) and my initial is 1-2% in the regions where the surname is found!
- appleiigs 6y ago
  No you can't. It's linked to the firm that pays for the subscription. Your bloomberg chat and models can have proprietary info that isn't brought to the new firm and your new ID.
snarf21 6y ago
Bloomberg terminal is the worst form of financial software except for all those others that have been tried. Or Word, or Windows, or Salesforce, or Zoom, or....
- asdfk-12 6y ago
  This is true. Abhorrent at first, then becomes second nature.
coliveira 6y ago
That is true, but it also misses the point. Even if there is a lot of personal pride in having a Bloomberg terminal, firms would put an end on that in no time if it was not in their best interest. The fact is that Bloomberg has created the perfect legal extortion tool with the terminal. They created a software company that is at the same time a media conglomerate. Every financial company in Wall Street wants to be on the good side of Bloomberg and receive positive or at least non-negative coverage. One way of keeping this going is having a large number of terminals installed.
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  You're claiming Bloomberg provides better, more positive coverage for their customers with more terminals. I'm very skeptical of your claim, as people would start discounting Bloomberg if they did so, but I suppose it's at least technically possible. So, do you have any evidence to back up this claim ? It wouldn't be that difficult to study the correlation, given that the terminals have been used for long enough time.
- kortilla 6y ago
  That doesn’t even make sense. Many financial companies give no fucks about press coverage (e.g. hedge funds, wealth funds, etc) and still pay.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
Can’t wait for some UI/UX people redesigning the UI with a “modern” look....
- dx034 6y ago
  They tried, it failed. They did a big redesign about 10 years ago to allow accessing functions also by search. So now you don't have to know codes anymore, it's just faster. But other attempts to redesign have been rolled back or never made it past testing stage. 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.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Are there certain requirements to get an account beyond just having 25k/year to pay for it? Let's say I wanted to get myself this Terminal and money wasn't an issue, would I be able to get one or are there other requirements?
- jshaqaw 6y ago
  Nope. Pay the money and get your terminal.
- chadash 6y ago
  You need: * 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)
  - retube 6y ago
    a bloomberg terminal isn't a physical terminal. it just runs on your PC
    - dx034 6y ago
      You need the keyboard and/or B-Unit for second factor authentication. Licenses are for a single person only and not transferable (there are machine-based licenses but those are increasingly rare). So you need a shipping address.
      - closeparen 6y ago
        Don’t a lot of places have a communal / semi-public Terminal? Obviously not for trading, but for information, like a library computer.
        dx034 6y ago
        Yes, those run on terminal based licenses. Bloomberg still sells those but you need to tell your sells rep exactly why you want one and don't get all features (e.g. IB). They are not very keen on selling those.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Instead of trying to "kill" the Bloomberg Terminal, it seems like a more rational choice, assuming success is the model we are trying to follow, would be to replicate it. 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.
- tim58 6y ago
  For a certain kind of user computer UI really peaked during the CLI age. Reading text and typing on a keyboard is the fastest way to get data into and out of computers.
- tommymachine 6y ago
  Efficiency is only material in terms of something. 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.
- apaprocki 6y ago
  I tried to have some fun illustrating this in a tweet reply using the Terminal https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/1230241842928791552 https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/1230241842928791552
vostok 6y ago
> they consider having a Bloomberg Terminal a mark of status 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.
walrus01 6y ago
> those folks are messaging each other with their Bloomberg IDs, so they know with each message who's in and who's out. 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.
bane 6y ago
>Bloomberg introduced one of the first, and certainly the longest-lasting, social networks when it debuted in 1981. Email is definitely an older electronic social network, only preceded by the telephone, postal mail, and face to face socialization.
joering2 6y ago
That gave me idea for luxury high income people social network, call it “luxuria”. 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. :)
- Erwin 6y ago
  Just a month after the App Store launched, someone sold a $999 "I am Rich" app: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
- willstrafach 6y ago
  This exists, though not exactly as you describe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASmallWorld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASmallWorld
infinite8s 6y ago
An interesting side-effect of the social network aspect of Bloomberg is that a lot of middle office employees need to have Bloomberg accounts as well (at least on the sell side) in order to communicate with their clients (they are basically paying 25k/person for a glorified chat app). That was a big driver for the Symphony project (a consortium of sell-side banks getting together and building a federated slack clone).

jedberg 6y ago

> A lot of people, including the author of this piece, misunderstand the uses of a Bloomberg Terminal. 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.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bitexploder 6y ago
It probably means they think it is worth 25,000*Factor -- In sales that factor can be quite high, 4, 6 or even 8 as a mark of a good sales person. In other industries it could be lower, but you expect that terminal to produce significantly more than it costs if you are willing to pay for it.
tpmx 6y ago
Either way: 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.)
- kovek 6y ago
  Can you explain an example insider trading situation involving Bloomberg terminals?
  - blueyes 6y ago
    I do not think that Bloomberg terminals are any more useful for insider trading, in the strict sense, than any other communication device, and probably less so because they are more likely to be monitored by one's employer. However, there is one exception: Bloomberg News publishes a lot of scoops about public companies. That is its raison d'être. To move markets. Those Bloomberg scoops are released to terminal subscribers 15-20 minutes before the news hits the rest of the market. So it's a kind of syndication of inside information, obtained by Bloomberg reporters from anonymous sources somehow apprised of the companies that the journalists cover. But Bloomberg doesn't trade. Its clients do. Bloomberg just reports, and there is nothing illegal about that.
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      Isn’t insider trading is defined as trading based on non-public information not available to other shareholders. (So you don’t have to be an actual insider - you could be trading on information you got by dumpster-diving). 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...
      - vmception 6y ago
        or 325,000 users counts as broadly disseminated 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.
appleiigs 6y ago
I think the idea that a bloomberg terminal is status symbol is not accurate. All it means is that I can save more than $25K in my trades per year by having it, which is a very small hurdle.
- dx034 6y ago
  I absolutely agree. I had a terminal for most of my career and while it's an amazing piece of software (Reuters offer doesn't come close despite them often having more extensive news and data) and it's super convenient for contacting brokers and banks, I never felt people without it were left out. Especially nowadays, it's not uncommon for brokers to only give traders Bloomberg and Analysts other software to save cost. Doesn't impede their status. Quite the opposite, we always used to say that we'd happily give away terminal access for $25k extra a year. The reason that never happened is because having Bloomberg Access is in the companies' interests, not just the employees' personal interest.

Uehreka 6y ago

What if Bloomberg made a "new UI", which you could easily toggle to/from, for the benefit of the people who don't like the current UI? Over time the number of people who use the current UI would become a smaller and smaller share of their customer base, and in like, 30 years, they could turn the old UI off.

andechs 6y ago
Why would they though? If their customer retention is already super high, the only reason to make an onboarding curve more shallow would be to acquire new users. Given there's already a social appeal to getting a Bloomberg Terminal, why would they invest the development time/dollars? What's their ROI?
- manquer 6y ago
  if you want to hire and retain highly talented folks they would want to work on new tech and product philosophies ? 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 .
  - cbzoiav 6y ago
    The problem with bloomberg lite is many of those users are now paying $10k instead of $25k. 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.

bsdz 6y ago

I think Bloomberg chat is much less important as a social network these days. It's heavily monitored by compliance departments and any communication that diverges from direct market trading is generally frowned upon.

DanBC 6y ago
Did that happen after the LIBOR scandal? https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/12/why-was-libor-rate-rigging-committed-over-the-bloomberg-terminal/ 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.
- bsdz 6y ago
  That was one contributing factor. There have been a lot of high profile scandals and this has led regulators to be far stricter. Eg we're not allowed to have personal phones in the office and must go to special areas in the building to use them. Some organisations confiscate phones (and I hear shoes) on entry; although I think this is more a concern about proprietary information.
  - disconcision 6y ago
    > I hear shoes Do people slide around in their socks or is there some kind of bowling shoes esque system?
    - userbinator 6y ago
      Sandals are common.
- andrepd 6y ago
  They can just "establish" the network using Bloomberg and actually discuss illegal things off-channel e.g. Signal.

mrtksn 6y ago

Is this thing extendable? I.E. are there tools built around it helping cool kids do even cooler stuff or game the system? I got the impression that it should be vulnerable to microsoft’s EEE.

Nextgrid 6y ago
> 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.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  It doesn't have to be MS who EEE's the Bloomberg terminal, does it?
joshcain 6y ago
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.
- mrtksn 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

divbzero 6y ago

What happens when a Bloomberg user moves to a different firm? Can they bring their Bloomberg ID with them?

jentist_retol 6y ago
That's not really that important. What is important is that they have an ID, at all.
cbzoiav 6y ago
I was pretty upset when I went from [initial][surname] to [initial][surname]1 after changing jobs.
- joshcain 6y ago
  Getting [initial][surname] is pretty impressive. My first ID was [initial][surname]7.
  - cbzoiav 6y ago
    My surname is incredibly rare (to the extent i'm probably the only one thats used Bloomberg) and my initial is 1-2% in the regions where the surname is found!
appleiigs 6y ago
No you can't. It's linked to the firm that pays for the subscription. Your bloomberg chat and models can have proprietary info that isn't brought to the new firm and your new ID.

snarf21 6y ago

Bloomberg terminal is the worst form of financial software except for all those others that have been tried. Or Word, or Windows, or Salesforce, or Zoom, or....

asdfk-12 6y ago
This is true. Abhorrent at first, then becomes second nature.

coliveira 6y ago

That is true, but it also misses the point. Even if there is a lot of personal pride in having a Bloomberg terminal, firms would put an end on that in no time if it was not in their best interest. The fact is that Bloomberg has created the perfect legal extortion tool with the terminal. They created a software company that is at the same time a media conglomerate. Every financial company in Wall Street wants to be on the good side of Bloomberg and receive positive or at least non-negative coverage. One way of keeping this going is having a large number of terminals installed.

drivebycomment 6y ago
You're claiming Bloomberg provides better, more positive coverage for their customers with more terminals. I'm very skeptical of your claim, as people would start discounting Bloomberg if they did so, but I suppose it's at least technically possible. So, do you have any evidence to back up this claim ? It wouldn't be that difficult to study the correlation, given that the terminals have been used for long enough time.
kortilla 6y ago
That doesn’t even make sense. Many financial companies give no fucks about press coverage (e.g. hedge funds, wealth funds, etc) and still pay.

spaetzleesser 6y ago

Can’t wait for some UI/UX people redesigning the UI with a “modern” look....

dx034 6y ago
They tried, it failed. They did a big redesign about 10 years ago to allow accessing functions also by search. So now you don't have to know codes anymore, it's just faster. But other attempts to redesign have been rolled back or never made it past testing stage. 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.

Nextgrid 6y ago

Are there certain requirements to get an account beyond just having 25k/year to pay for it? Let's say I wanted to get myself this Terminal and money wasn't an issue, would I be able to get one or are there other requirements?

jshaqaw 6y ago
Nope. Pay the money and get your terminal.
chadash 6y ago
You need: * 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)
- retube 6y ago
  a bloomberg terminal isn't a physical terminal. it just runs on your PC
  - dx034 6y ago
    You need the keyboard and/or B-Unit for second factor authentication. Licenses are for a single person only and not transferable (there are machine-based licenses but those are increasingly rare). So you need a shipping address.
    - closeparen 6y ago
      Don’t a lot of places have a communal / semi-public Terminal? Obviously not for trading, but for information, like a library computer.
      - dx034 6y ago
        Yes, those run on terminal based licenses. Bloomberg still sells those but you need to tell your sells rep exactly why you want one and don't get all features (e.g. IB). They are not very keen on selling those.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

Instead of trying to "kill" the Bloomberg Terminal, it seems like a more rational choice, assuming success is the model we are trying to follow, would be to replicate it. 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.

tim58 6y ago
For a certain kind of user computer UI really peaked during the CLI age. Reading text and typing on a keyboard is the fastest way to get data into and out of computers.
tommymachine 6y ago
Efficiency is only material in terms of something. 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.
apaprocki 6y ago
I tried to have some fun illustrating this in a tweet reply using the Terminal https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/1230241842928791552 https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/1230241842928791552

vostok 6y ago

> they consider having a Bloomberg Terminal a mark of status 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.

walrus01 6y ago

> those folks are messaging each other with their Bloomberg IDs, so they know with each message who's in and who's out. 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.

bane 6y ago

>Bloomberg introduced one of the first, and certainly the longest-lasting, social networks when it debuted in 1981. Email is definitely an older electronic social network, only preceded by the telephone, postal mail, and face to face socialization.

joering2 6y ago

That gave me idea for luxury high income people social network, call it “luxuria”. 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. :)

Erwin 6y ago
Just a month after the App Store launched, someone sold a $999 "I am Rich" app: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
willstrafach 6y ago
This exists, though not exactly as you describe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASmallWorld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASmallWorld

infinite8s 6y ago

An interesting side-effect of the social network aspect of Bloomberg is that a lot of middle office employees need to have Bloomberg accounts as well (at least on the sell side) in order to communicate with their clients (they are basically paying 25k/person for a glorified chat app). That was a big driver for the Symphony project (a consortium of sell-side banks getting together and building a federated slack clone).