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Tell that to the boys over at Dealbreaker. They've been waiting for a Bloomberg killer for eons now. But i don't think it'll be easy to build a Bloomberg kille

Tell that to the boys over at Dealbreaker. They've been waiting for a Bloomberg killer for eons now. But i don't think it'll be easy to build a Bloomberg killer because the main reason why Bloomberg is so popular in the financial circles is that it provides breaking news and lots of historical financial data that you won't find elsewhere. So it is not much of a technology edge than a content edge. As for the Digg-like site, you are right in saying there would not be enough people who would use it. I would think most online investors are those who thrash talk on Yahoo Finance boards. A site like yours would require input from intelligent investors, which unfortunately form a small subset of the online investing community. Hence the lack of scale may render this idea ineffective.

gaius 18y ago
I used to work for Bloomberg's biggest rival, and I know exactly why they are so popular: they understand their end users. RivalCorp doesn't really get it at all. R (as we'll call them) tries to sell to a bank's IT department, and Bloomberg tries to end-run IT and sell to the traders (guess who has the most power in an investment bank). R spent years and hundreds of millions retrofitting TCP/IP onto everything (which traders simply don't care about), Bloomberg spent that time and money setting up deals with tailors and wine merchants (I'm not kidding) for users of its terminals. They made their users feel like insiders, a privileged elite, which is something all bankers crave. Plus, Bloomberg terminals are sexy. They look like something out of Star Trek. R terminals looked like beige-box PCs. Sure there are technological reasons too, but Bloomberg's success is cultural first and foremost.
- furiouslol 18y ago
  That's very true. I'm guessing you used to work for ThomsonReuters/Telerate. Monitor110 tried to be the Bloomberg killer and they had the street cred to pull it off. But they lack the content that traders want. So at the end of the day, content is one of the most key ingredients of any Bloomberg killer.

gaius 18y ago

I used to work for Bloomberg's biggest rival, and I know exactly why they are so popular: they understand their end users. RivalCorp doesn't really get it at all. R (as we'll call them) tries to sell to a bank's IT department, and Bloomberg tries to end-run IT and sell to the traders (guess who has the most power in an investment bank). R spent years and hundreds of millions retrofitting TCP/IP onto everything (which traders simply don't care about), Bloomberg spent that time and money setting up deals with tailors and wine merchants (I'm not kidding) for users of its terminals. They made their users feel like insiders, a privileged elite, which is something all bankers crave. Plus, Bloomberg terminals are sexy. They look like something out of Star Trek. R terminals looked like beige-box PCs. Sure there are technological reasons too, but Bloomberg's success is cultural first and foremost.

furiouslol 18y ago
That's very true. I'm guessing you used to work for ThomsonReuters/Telerate. Monitor110 tried to be the Bloomberg killer and they had the street cred to pull it off. But they lack the content that traders want. So at the end of the day, content is one of the most key ingredients of any Bloomberg killer.