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Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky–Everyone Still Uses It

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Re: Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky–Everyone Still Uses It

#2

Post by ggm »

It's Emacs. Well.. not exactly but I bet an Emacs user would Very quickly feel at home.

"The ui is hard to learn" is a selling feature not a problem. It's like sabre or amadeus: it helps the industry keep out time wasters and maximises the agents sense of skill and value.

The socialised effect of "trade in Bloomberg or get a worse deal" probably makes the alternatives very niche.

If something like the LME had developed a terminal I could see it having the same value to it's community, or the bank settlement systems. Something used by most of your cohort, easier to stay inside it.

It's contract enforced API access. Illegal scrapers risk being excluded. If you pay the fees you get the spec apparently.

Re: Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky–Everyone Still Uses It

#5

Post by GianFabien »

ggm wrote: post #2

It's Emacs. Well.. not exactly but I bet an Emacs user would Very quickly feel at home. "The ui is hard to learn" is a selling feature not a problem. It's like sabre or amadeus: it helps the industry keep out time wasters and maximises the agents sense of skill and value. The socialised effect of "trade in Bloomberg or get a worse deal" probably makes the alternatives very niche. If something like the LME had develop…

Have worked with Sabre and early GUI interfaces for travel agents. It has only taken 30 years for WebJet to deliver something consumers could use and has displaced swathes of travel agents.

Re: Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky–Everyone Still Uses It

#6

Post by jmclnx »

I remember hearing a few years ago the Bloomberg Terminal was "redone" to be Windows based. Is that true ? Or do they still run on top of their own OS.

I would have thought if they would have move anywhere, it would have been to Linux or maybe even a *BSD to avoid the GPL.

Re: Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky–Everyone Still Uses It

#8

Post by cmacleod4 »

jmclnx wrote: post #6

I remember hearing a few years ago the Bloomberg Terminal was "redone" to be Windows based. Is that true ? Or do they still run on top of their own OS. I would have thought if they would have move anywhere, it would have been to Linux or maybe even a *BSD to avoid the GPL.

The Bloomberg Terminal started as dedicated hardware, but it has been Windows-based software for at least 20 years. At one time a Solaris-based version was developed, but that never took off and was dropped. These days there are plenty of Linux servers running back-end code in the Bloomberg data centres, but I've not heard of any plan to support Linux on the front-end.

Re: Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky–Everyone Still Uses It

#9

Post by cmacleod4 »

wiseowise wrote: post #4

> Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky What, not enough white space, animations, and shitty, obscure menus for you? Or maybe they need Material 69 or Liquid Glass?

The target market is "power users" who want maximum functionality and don't care much about prettiness.

I used to work on some of the code behind those "clunky" screens. I would say that Bloomberg UIs generally do quite a good job of making the functionality scale - you can do basic stuff quickly with sensible defaults, but when you need more sophistication the UI lets you dig deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

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