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...P R I S M...
That's not sold, so not comparable to BB.
That's not sold
No, given freely away for "protection".
Evil mode off:
I have less problems with western TLAs as they exist today but find it very scary to think about what might happen once we see a really big data leak from FB. Or Facebook folds and is bought by someone who's set on making money from the assets.
It's very hard to break out of that, because doing so means you're now excluded from some of the most useful and important information. Nobody wants to be first to leave, and convincing enough users to leave en masse to create or use an alternative seems impossible at this point.
I believe one of their great data advantages is access. Buy a terminal and you will now have access to niche email distribution lists that no website sees or crawls with important market data (like fixed income bwics).
I believe it is difficult to attack Bloomberg head on as others are trying (like money.net or Eikon) but relatively easy to build really rich ecosystems in niche places outside of Bloomberg. Have you heard of a company called Intex? Probably not. In the global structured products market they are a monopoly solution generating 100-200mm in top line with 100 employees and 3 sales people. Wildly profitable but try to start something like that without being in structured products for years and you're dead on arrival. No one will give you the data you need.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre > A dark fibre network or simply dark network is a privately operated optical fiber network that is run directly by its operator over dark fibre leased or purchased from another supplier. This is in contrast to purchasing bandwidth or leased line capacity on an existing network. Dark fibre networks may be used for private networking, or as Internet access or infrastructure.
They GP talked about "installing a decent amount of dark fiber" not running a network over someone else's unused fiber, which I think is the "network" part of your quote.
Another point - Bloomberg by an large doesn't fail. This isn't some consumer "build fast, break things, and iterate" model. I can remember one time in my two decades using Bloomberg that something broke. For half a day this year the IB chat system went down. The world of finance practically ground to a halt. But that was the wild exception. Compared to most platforms Bloomberg may be a bit archaic but it is rock soli…
It seems as if there's a lot of behind the scenes data aggregation and analytics, which is good. But surely somebody has created a cheap variation on the rest of it? I.e. software with keystrokes to quickly access open financial data? I mean there's nothing to stop someone doing that, getting custom keyboards made, and selling it for a tiny fraction of the price right? I'd imagine that there are quite a lot of people…
It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information. The keyboard is specialized because it literally reduces the number of keystrokes required to quickly access financial information. This is a business where seconds matter - even when you have humans talking to other humans to negotiate trades. Literally almost every piece of useful financial information is available via bloomberg. And…
This is hyperbole, I've worked on dev side in finance a while now and bloomberg data is often unreliable, everywhere I've worked people have built layers on top of it, checking vs other sources and fat fingers. Also I'm actually currently working for some oil guys and they use bloomberg for some things but use specialist providers for oil macro, shipping and refinery events. I'd say their main advantages are familiar…
I think Bloomberg is a lot weaker than people realize (in terms of competitive position). It offers a lot of functionality as many threads have pointed out but at any given time, the marginal user utilizes 0.5% of what it does. I sat in fixed income origination for years and the only reason I used it was to find some obscure pricing details which are now available for free elsewhere and to quickly export interest rat…
www.bamsec.com
ps this is not a personal plug. I do know the founder now but only after I discovered tool and reached out.
Interesting read on Bloomberg vs Symphony (through an EU policy lens, but has a lot of details about BBG business model I hadn't read elsewhere) http://www.politico.eu/article/bloomberg-vs-the-banks/
I worked on Thomson Reuters Messenger, which Symphony tried hiring ex-Thomson people to work on. Symphony is a joke and will never gain any traction in any market. Bloomberg is the king, and if you don't have money you use Reuters. Otherwise your probably not very high end on finance.