How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
fastcompany.com
How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
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Re: How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
#2Re: How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
#3Dup, most relevant previous discussion:
Re: How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
#4The Bloomberg terminal is awesome! By now its been iterated to a point where it's like the Microsoft Office of Finance. It does everything and there is no way for one person to understand everything it can do.
It also has the nice lock in feature of the 20% of features that each person needs is different. This is probably the biggest reason why no one is yet encroaching on their territory.
it you trade debt, it has your yield curves
If you trade currencies it has your currency rate matrix.
Back office, you've got PORT and MARS for portfolio and risk management.
Developer, you've got the Bloomberg API that allows you to pull real time quotes for any exchange in the world.
And if you are stuck they do something that seems inconceivable to startups today, they have actual people you can talk to that help you figure out how to solve your problem!
One other often overlooked benefit of the terminal is that Bloomberg unlocked it via Bloomberg Anywhere. This means you can install the Bloomberg terminal software on any machine you want and then login to use it so that you aren't locked to a particular machine unlike the old Bloomberg Terminals.
The downside of this is that you can only be logged in at one place at a time, but pretty much everyone uses this setup nowadays.
And there is IB the Bloomberg instant messenger, just by typing in a name you can talk to anyone else with a terminal, which is pretty much anyone you'd want to in finance.
IB is also a sneaky way for recruiters to find out who they should be contacting:)
Re: How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
#5One of the most interesting things about the Bloomberg terminal that never seems to get mentioned in all the coverage and commenting is that its UI is optimized for users who actually take the time to go through training.
In particular, everything is designed so that you never have to touch the mouse. If there are 20 choices onscreen, they'll all be numbered, and you type the number of the choice you want and press enter. This allows for incredibly fast interaction, but with a bit of a learning curve. And customers take the time to learn, because their peers and their boss emphasize how valuable that investment of time will be.
If the terminal were being introduced today, without that existing body of zealots to preach the value of getting over the initial learning curve, there's no way Bloomnberg could get away with it. The sales team would visit a potential customer, the customer's eyes would boggle at the UI, and Sales would come back to the office demanding a redesign that looks like Microsoft Office and is mouse-centric.
Re: How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
#6One of the most interesting things about the Bloomberg terminal that never seems to get mentioned in all the coverage and commenting is that its UI is optimized for users who actually take the time to go through training. In particular, everything is designed so that you never have to touch the mouse. If there are 20 choices onscreen, they'll all be numbered, and you type the number of the choice you want and press e…
> If the terminal were being introduced today, without that existing body of zealots to preach the value of getting over the initial learning curve,...
Honest question: doesn't it also have a lot to do with the technical sophistication of the typical user, not just lock-in?
Re: How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
#7There are some of us HNers that develop the Terminal software/infrastructure (or used to)... so if there's ever anything you were dying to ask, AMAA. :)
Re: How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
#8There are some of us HNers that develop the Terminal software/infrastructure (or used to)... so if there's ever anything you were dying to ask, AMAA. :)
The article mentions private network, is this still the case? Did they run network lines directly to terminal locations?
Re: How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
#9The Bloomberg terminal is awesome! By now its been iterated to a point where it's like the Microsoft Office of Finance. It does everything and there is no way for one person to understand everything it can do. It also has the nice lock in feature of the 20% of features that each person needs is different. This is probably the biggest reason why no one is yet encroaching on their territory. it you trade debt, it has y…
The "help" button is very cool. Back when I worked at Bloomberg, I knew a few engineers who actually ended up on a customer support call because a customer found a bug. That's pretty cool; very few large companies will let people chat directly with engineers for bug diagnosis.
Re: How the Bloomberg Terminal Made History and Stays Relevant
#10There are some of us HNers that develop the Terminal software/infrastructure (or used to)... so if there's ever anything you were dying to ask, AMAA. :)
The article mentions private network, is this still the case? Did they run network lines directly to terminal locations?
Yes, we run one of the largest (if not largest) private financial network in the world. Something like 180+ countries, close to 1,000 core routers, etc. with proper DR (dual-homing, separate fiber, risers). It's not like we run a NOC in each customer's office. It is all standard stuff -- you concentrate in big cities and run lines to individual customers. Lines are exactly the same type of lines you'd provision for Internet access (anything from a T1 to OC-3 and beyond, metro ethernet, etc.)
You can certainly connect to us over the public Internet as well -- but you have to factor in down-time, latency, and other factors. There are big Internet outages that have happened in past years (e.g. anchors cutting cables) where we kept our customers online while the Internet was down in the entire country.