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

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).