The outage isn't that bad. I've talked to 5 other firms in Canada this morning and haven't heard of a single one that is down. Bloomberg's tickering plant is still working and their emsx(trading system) is up and running, albeit a bit slow right now. I think it was on a stackoverflow podcast that Joel or Jeff said that it makes you wonder about people who complain about down time if they've ever built something of th…
It was pretty widespread in the (European) morning
seemed completely and utterly down in London across a good sample of clients.
Bloomberg started out as a network system independent of the Internet. Michael Bloomberg was a network engineer. I'm not sure they ever really switched to proper TCP/IP. This company sure looks like a dinosaur these days. However its hard to imagine a company being able to replace even a chunk of their infrastructure. They are tightly integrated into all institutions and there is no other service which offers a compl…
Yes I think to replace them someone needs to create a marketplace for different aspects of Bloomberg and you buy access to specific services and data as you need it. Would be an amazing business that, supposing you could get buy in from a load of other firms.
Really don't see an ala carte solution being worth it for most firms unless they're really trying to cut down on cost. Integrating and maintaining separate services alone is going to require additional developers. Cost associated with that coupled with quality of service and reliability (outside of this situation) of Bloomberg's current offering makes it a very tough sale. Also, guys who have been using terminals for years are really not going to want to switch.
Bloomberg started out as a network system independent of the Internet. Michael Bloomberg was a network engineer. I'm not sure they ever really switched to proper TCP/IP. This company sure looks like a dinosaur these days. However its hard to imagine a company being able to replace even a chunk of their infrastructure. They are tightly integrated into all institutions and there is no other service which offers a compl…
Yes I think to replace them someone needs to create a marketplace for different aspects of Bloomberg and you buy access to specific services and data as you need it. Would be an amazing business that, supposing you could get buy in from a load of other firms.
interesting view - what makes Bloomberg brilliant (aside from the support) is that i have, for example, an array of my portfolios that i can access from every function. So if you could create a service that took all of the information that was relevant to you (portfolios, news feeds, models etc) and normalize it to make it interoperable with a whole host of 3rd party systems, you could be on to something!
Is this the first crack in the Hoover Dam that is Bloomberg Terminals? Probably not - but the widespread reliance on the $10k+ per year terminal in the financial services industry means that this thing is ripe for disruption. The key isn't to build a terminal replacement though. fintech startups need to chip away at little bits and pieces - and need to inter-operate as much as possible. Only then will the bbg dominan…
one of the reasons i'm generally Ok with Slack's valuation is that there is a ton of room for a messaging service to offer a service that is secure and auditable at the level that the SEC/FINRA and Banks require. Like the article mentions, if you talk to the people using BBG, it's really the chat functionality that provides the main value for literally everyone, at least in my experience (former front office dev)
I'm unfamiliar with these terminals (have kind of always wanted to play with one), but at first blush, a "secure and auditable" messaging system does not seem that difficult to build.
Is it a legitimate compliance or practical implementation problem, or is it just the network effect?
one of the reasons i'm generally Ok with Slack's valuation is that there is a ton of room for a messaging service to offer a service that is secure and auditable at the level that the SEC/FINRA and Banks require. Like the article mentions, if you talk to the people using BBG, it's really the chat functionality that provides the main value for literally everyone, at least in my experience (former front office dev)
I'm unfamiliar with these terminals (have kind of always wanted to play with one), but at first blush, a "secure and auditable" messaging system does not seem that difficult to build. Is it a legitimate compliance or practical implementation problem, or is it just the network effect?
Decades of crusty code - C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran, home brewed versions of the STL, nih syndrome across the tooling. Actually surprised outages not more common. Still, given their interview process is basically parlour trick questions about pointers and char arrays, it is quite telling!
Bloomberg started out as a network system independent of the Internet. Michael Bloomberg was a network engineer. I'm not sure they ever really switched to proper TCP/IP. This company sure looks like a dinosaur these days. However its hard to imagine a company being able to replace even a chunk of their infrastructure. They are tightly integrated into all institutions and there is no other service which offers a compl…
Random anecdote: Was told by a trader a few years back that one trading desk had both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters systems next to one another and once they were able to capitalise on Bloomberg being a few seconds faster to make a net gain.
This is really not possible. If there's any truth to this story at all you have forgotten the real version.
"Service has been fully restored. We experienced a combination of hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume of network traffic. This led to customer disconnections as a result of the machines being overwhelmed. We discovered the root cause quickly, isolated the faulty hardware, and restarted the software. We are reviewing our multiple redundant systems, which failed to prevent this disruption."
Decades of crusty code - C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran, home brewed versions of the STL, nih syndrome across the tooling. Actually surprised outages not more common. Still, given their interview process is basically parlour trick questions about pointers and char arrays, it is quite telling!
I swear I should start a consultancy in the control of software complexity because I am seeing this sort of thing everywhere, and the downages and security issues will only continue (or get worse, as we continue to rely more on software)
I'm unfamiliar with these terminals (have kind of always wanted to play with one), but at first blush, a "secure and auditable" messaging system does not seem that difficult to build. Is it a legitimate compliance or practical implementation problem, or is it just the network effect?
Network effect.
Its not just the network effect..Bloomberg's messaging system is tightly integrated with the other functionality of the terminal..for example one can execute a trade via a message or get live streaming quotes.