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The terminal, and particularly the business model around it, is widely disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible amount of power as the only high quality source for certain types of data, and they tie it to the terminal. There are all sorts of contractual requirements around data not leaving the machine the terminal.

It's not uncommon to hear stories about small trading shops or asset managers having a shared terminals which they run over to do specific actions, or a substantial amount of effort being put into automated data extraction which avoids Bloomberg's controls.

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>> widely disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible amount of power as the only high quality source for certain types of data

I agree the terminals are disdained, but I never understood this. The rest of your comment justifies the value. They provide great data (which they spend a boatload of money to get/clean) and they sell it. Customers don't have to buy it, they can try to get the data themselves.

I used a BB terminal extensively for over a decade. It saved me orders of magnitude in work, there is no way I could have obtained all this data myself on an ongoing basis and had it available easily via API. They make a lot of money, and they deserve it.

I had colleagues try to switch to Reuters terminals and they came ashamedly back to Bloomberg, hat in hand.

The complaint seems pretty straightforward to me. As you note, the value Bloomberg provides is all in its data and software, not in the physical terminal itself. The terminal is effectively just DRM, a giant dongle you have to use to access the data and services.

Back in the day you could make an argument for the value of locking services to a proprietary terminal, since most people didn't have a computer on their desk and all and there were no common standards for those that did. But these days there is a ubiquitously accessible common standard for desktop information systems: the x86-based PC running Microsoft Windows. Having to use a proprietary terminal means not being able to use all the knowledge of that standard platform the user has built up over the years, and having to build up a new stock of knowledge about the baroque weirdnesses of that proprietary terminal. So I can totally see how someone would wish they could just access that highly valuable data and software on the machine they already know how to use.

Much of the data is already accessible from almost any client that can run the BBDL (Bloomberg Data License API, or whatever the name du jour is) Many software vendors embed BBDL pulls using the API. For example, SunGard Front Arena and PolyPaths both pull rates/prices/SMFs/curves seamlessly from BBDL regardless of whether you are running on the terminal or not. This has been the case for over a decade at least.

As for the individual software being available on different machines, they have a solution for some of that (Bloomberg BVAL Pricing Service, or the name du jour).

Ultimately, they want a vertically integrated UX where the models and screens have a very intuitive correlate on their proprietary keyboard (oh, and DRM.) It is a choice, you cant fault them for choosing that route.

There are plenty of competitors who have come along (and died) trying to offer something else. Everyone is free to choose those.

It is a bit like Apple and iOS. I once went to Android for 2yrs, and then came back to iOS because I saw the value of things just working well together.

The « physical terminal itself » is your PC. The Bloomberg « terminal » is just software plus an authentication device.

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