A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard (2017)

What the what?? That is one of the most intense things I've seen in a while! Three full color screens on a keyboard... woah.

We keep a running tally on our trading desk on how many starboard keyboards we each go through a year. Average seems to be about 3 per person! I did 5 last year, although one did get dirty and I just wanted a replacement hehe. Q/A must be terrible.

Maybe stop spilling coffee on your keyboard?

There are barely any true proprietary alternatives, let alone open ones.

It’s not the terminal, it’s the people that feed information and research. The terminal is just access to that information.

I worked there in a past life, still miss having access to the terminal. Ive always wished they launched a consumer version for <100 USD a month.

Data aggregation is how the Terminal built its user-base, but messaging is what actually keeps people there. Bloomberg Chat is where most large trades get negotiated -- so if you don't have a login, you don't really have an identity as a trader. Makes it hard to switch.

It's a terrific example of network effect as moat. Several years ago, six of the largest banks got together to fund Symphony as a Bloomberg-killing chat tool [1]. More than $100M invested later, it's still only successfully competing with Bloomberg for internal chat at financial firms [2]. Inter-company chats are still happening mainly on full price terminals that costs 100x what Symphony costs for a seat.

[1] https://symphony.com/press/releases/consortium-leading-finan... [2] https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83...

Sadly no. The only viable (and closed) alternative to Bloomberg Terminal is Eikon from Thomson Reuters [1].

However, I find Routers finance news & details much more accessible than those from Bloomberg as they offer a bunch of rss feeds, depending on category you'd like to track.

[1] https://eikon.thomsonreuters.com/index.html [2] https://www.reuters.com/tools/rss

Try KloudTrader. We are currently building one.

https://KloudTrader.com

Check out www.tiingo.com. I use it for my casual needs.

Usually when I hear people talk about alternatives to Bloomberg, my first though is that that they have no idea how many things Bloomberg actually covers. Sooo many products, so much data, you wouldn't even believe the scale. And yeah, as others have mentioned, massive network effect, essentially everyone in the capital markets. Sure, you might find an alternative for some very narrow specific thing that it does for a lot less money. (Worked there for many years, foreign exchange and bond trading stuff.)

Google Finance is a laughable comparison to Bloomberg. Bloomberg is basically a self contained world. When I last dealt with it in the early 2000s, it had an internal messaging system, real time feeds for news from all over the world, and ability to trade and query on all sorts of markets around the globe. IIRC, your Bloomberg messaging handle is yours basically for life so no matter which company you work for you can still be reachable. It also integrates well with Excel and provides a huge amount of complex financial calculation functions (which I suppose Google or some other alternative might be able to do too, assuming they can hire the people who has the expertise). Oh and around the clock support. The only alternative that's even remotely close to that is Reuter's service. You can see why that's the only alternative -- very few organizations have the means to tap into all these data sources from around the world in basically real time.

You need to use a Bloomberg terminal and observe its users use them to really get an idea of what it provides before you can make a reasonable suggestion for an alternative.

Any details about the font? Download links?

>I would easily pay $10/m for a "personal" version and I know companies that would pay 2x - 3x that for enterprise deployment. Although to an extent - it's redundant now that we have phones with biometric authentication.

You're off by a factor of 10 on how much a service like that will cost, especially in enterprise.

What do you want to use it for? Can you not using something like Google Authenticator for 2-factor auth?

You would find plenty of people who might argue that using the mouse would slow them down. I'm no keyboard purist but I do like an interface where I don't have to take my hands from the home keys. Also if you consider laptop keyboards the trackpad usually sits just south of the space bar keeping it nearer the hands.

My mouse is to the left of my keyboard, are there any right-handed programmers ?

Why would you strain your wrist? You don't need to have mouse strictly perpendicular to the display, it can sit at an angle and you only move it relatively to the "resting" position. I use large and ten-key keyboards everywhere and my mouse has at least 20-30 cm of free space to the right side of keyboard - no fatigue issues at all and my wrist on mouse hand is always straight.

I'm fine with the classic PS/2 layout on desktops.

But I do have a problem with laptops that have numeric keypads. Manufacturers seem to add them to their higher-spec products (the ones that are developer-worthy) in order to signal their higher value. When I really would rather have the option to not have it and let my hands center themselves under the screen.

I found this was true for me after a while. I also noticed that, while typing, my hands were not in front of me but off to the left, which caused further stress. I've switched to a numpad-less keyboard and my pain has decreased.

According to the article, their first speaker-integrated keyboard was released in 1992. That's 26 years ago. Patent term is only 20 years in the US. The patent must have expired long ago.

Check out Verbatim's keyboard from a decade ago (with built-in speakers):

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/technology/personaltech/1...

It didn't sell well. The reason keyboards don't have speakers today, is more likely because there isn't much demand for it. It would add bulk, cost and complexity to keyboards, with a likely underwhelming audio result.

I'm sure that I had a keyboard with speakers in it years ago in the early 2000's.

Intergraph workstations in mid 90's almost universally came with NMB keyboards with integrated speakers. The keyboards were bulky and had half inch quite rigid cable. Notably, John Carmack used such workstation for Quake 2 development.

If you want a high quality keyboard, get a Cherry http://cherry.de/cid/index.htm

pckeyboard.com makes and sells the only buckling-spring keyboards on the market. They're missing a big plate of steel to make it weigh an extra pound, but they appear to be as reliable as the Model M that they are based on.

No lighting available. PS/2 or USB, black or white-tan, with a pointing stick or without. Reasonably priced.

Besides my chair (a HM Embody whose price I still don't like thinking about), the most comfortable/enjoyable thing I've ever bought for my work was my first mechanical keyboard, a Vortex Pok3r 60% keyboard with a set of SA profile keycaps. A good keyboard makes a world of difference. At the moment, I'm actually in the middle of building a custom 65% keyboard. Just waiting on the PCB to arrive after the first one was damaged in transit.

It's a bug. Once you get bit, you'll gladly jump down the keyboard rabbit hole.

Care to elaborate or do you just like to let everyone know when you've noticed something obvious?

I don't think its psychological, having dedicated keys is better for almost all applications than having to re-purpose a general purpose input device.

not that part but their header disappearing and reappearing is annoying. I'm on a smallish laptop screen, scrolling up to look at a picture immediately results in less space to read and covering the photo I just scrolled up to see.

So I have to scroll up to the photo, and then scroll down a little to make the header disappear.

Weird. On Chrome OS X the font looks properly anti-aliased.

The keyboards had speakers because at that time not many business PCs had speakers connected if they had soundcards. This provided a physical volume slider to listen to news out loud as well as a headphone/mic jack for private listening. Later uses allowed using the mic for squawkbox like functionality communicating between employees on various desks. The Terminal has had streaming audio and video since forever now. (Audio use cases involve things like earnings calls, investor relations as well as news.) Aside from A/V, the Terminal also has had text to speech for news for a very long time as well.