Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

I think most of your questions can be answered by realizing that Bloomberg was founded in 1981, and they basically got a monopoly in financial data provision because there were no other options in 1981. That is why they have a custom monitor & keyboard: in the days before the IBM PC, everyone had a custom monitor & keyboard, because these things were not standardized. Bloomberg was a technologist & businessman before he was a politician; his business success gave him the money to run for office, his office doesn't force people to pay for Bloomberg.

The reason they're still a monopoly is because knowing how to navigate a Bloomberg is a critical skill for most finance professionals, and now that they have that skillset, they can be very productive moving around in it. A different (better?) UI would require they re-learn everything, which is not going to happen. And when financial professionals are making half a million a year, paying $24k/year for a terminal so that they can be productive isn't a bad investment.

(Source: have a couple friends at Bloomberg. One is in their UI department, and keeps having his proposals for better UIs shot down for business reasons. Also married a financial professional who had to use a Bloomberg in her days as a bond trader.)

Symphony was marketed by Goldman Sachs and Blackrock as a $15 Bloomberg killer, but still has not gained much traction. Bloomberg provides real-time data feeds, analysis tools, real-time secure communication with other traders, news and entertainment. When you are looking after AUMs of tens or hundreds of billions, $24,000 a year for a Bloomberg subscription is negligible.

"Potential users don’t want to get onboard unless all the other people in their ecosystem are on the service. That dynamic obviously keeps most people from joining Symphony. Most everyone working in financial markets is already on Bloomberg, and it would take virtually everyone leaving at the same time to give Symphony critical mass.

“I think Facebook is the best comparison,” Ayzerov says. “If Facebook had only one fourth of your friends, you wouldn’t use it. The advantage of Bloomberg is that every financial person has it.”"

See http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3572874/banking... for some of the obstacles that Symphony faces

Voting up on the Bloomberg Chat. Most of the people in Finance do not really use other functions but due to network effects, most people get 'connected' via Bloomberg Chat.

And it's not just a UI on some public data - Bloomberg also does some hard core networking behind those screens, up to installing a decent amount of dark fiber into various exchanges around the world to ensure low latency connections between data sources and consumers.

The terminal is the 'last-mile' endpoint in a centralized system that delivers real-time data to subscribers with low latency and actually allows them to take action on data. Low latency is what sets it apart from closest competitors such as Reuters.

The ability to trade is perhaps no so important these days given the advent of algo trading/stat arb, but it serves to emphasize the point that there is more to the terminal than just viewing the data.