Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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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.)

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.

Dark fiber means unused. How does that help?

The term 'dark fiber' is also used as a product to be bought from a network company, which the customer (in this case bloomberg) then lights up themselves.

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.

Bloomberg and co buy lit, dark, and switched products. In NYC, they purchase these products from the incumbent players.

I take it to mean they roll out their own physical fiber, and don't just lease or ride someone else's network.

It's sounds more secret and cool?

You're right.

They're a total 80's icon, too. If you see a movie set in the early 80's and there's a computer-ish thing on someone's desk, it's most likely a Bloomberg terminal.

The movie "Wall Street" is littered with them.

Not sure if you mean the new "Wall Street" (which I haven't seen), but in the old one, those are Quotrons, not Bloombergs. Bloombergs have always been orange-on-black not green or white.

Way back when, only bond traders used Bloombergs. Equity and FX guys used other things (Quotron, Reuters, maybe?)

Oh dear, my mistake.

During an interview they told me back in the days the state of the art was delivery boys running between wall street and banks and other firms with (often unlabeled) paper notes... and that was as "real time" as you could get

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