There are a few things which are hard to replicate: - The data. Apart from contracts with exchanges, the large amount of development work to speak all the diff

There are a few things which are hard to replicate: - The data. Apart from contracts with exchanges, the large amount of development work to speak all the different protocols (and the tech to then distribute that data with lowish latency), and importing data from numerous other sources, there is also the army of people they employ to read through lots of nominally public data and enter into the system (things like details of every bond issuance, lots of company financials, etc). And don’t forget their own newswire as well as the subscriptions to other outlets you get. Another issue is with the contracts for third-party data they provide: there are likely conditions on how Bloomberg may distribute this data and Bloomberg likely do a lot of work to follow/enforce them (eg restricting the ways data may be extracted, per-head subscription charges, etc) - Network effects. In particular their IM is used to trade a lot of things OTC. A new competitor would not offer customers access to that liquidity. There are also Bloomberg run platforms which let you request quotes and trade straight from your terminal. (Having to pay $24k/yr ‘just’ for Bloomberg chat is one of the big complaints about the price of the terminal as often the chat is the main service people want) - People are used to the janky UI and likely won’t appreciate having to learn a different one. One more thing is that the sticker price may not be what people are paying: they may pay a lot more for live market data, and they may get various negotiated discounts too. Perhaps another question to ask is why this post doesn’t even mention the main competitor, EIKON, which is cheaper (a lot cheaper for some use-cases) and yet not massively more popular. Maybe it isn’t sufficiently cheap for the marginal price difference to be worth it.