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Comment by yuppie_scum | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered what the secret sauce is that Bloomberg has that’s so sticky, aside from force of habit and hesitance to change.

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1) Accuracy - their accuracy is unmatched. Seriously, reliability is the #1 reason I value Bloomberg. I've used most of their competitors and I almost always have to double/triple check primary sources if I'm going to publish the data in a high profile report, but I can rely on Bloomberg.

2) Speed - they are extremely fast to publish market news. Their reporters are very good and have a lot of primary sources and scoops, especially for companies that may not be otherwise newsworthy.

3) Excel integration - their Excel plugin is huge, it's almost like it's own program. Many of our spreadsheets are built around them. You can pretty much export every data field in the exact format you want if you know what you're doing

4) Support - they have staff available to answer questions 24/7, and their staff is extremely knowledgeable. It's the most amazing customer service I've ever experienced. Imagine you're a new analyst at an investment bank, fresh out of school, it's 1am, you've been told to put together a model and you have no idea what you're doing. You type HELP HELP in a Bloomberg terminal and they'll not only help you, but they often will make the spreadsheet for you.

All that said, their user interface is terrible (though it has its fans, and it is extremely fast once you've learned the shortcuts) and accessibility is cumbersome, especially if you're working remotely or want something fast from your desktop. But I'm still a huge fan. I don't even use it for trading, I mostly focus on equities and mergers, though they would be the first place I'd check if I needed info on fixed income or derivatives too.

On top of the support staff, they stressed the importance of customer service for all employees. I remember being told that even as a random engineer, if terminal users were to ask me for help I should at least point them in the right direction (e.g. HELP HELP like you said).

Without knowing too much about it I always thought the "Chat" feature provides a pretty strong lock-in.

> When I started in 2002, we only had Bloomberg Messaging, which allowed users to simply static message each other within the Bloomberg ecosystem. I think it was maybe 2004 that Instant Bloomberg was introduced and began to write the book on product stickiness.

This old blog post talks about this a bit: https://medium.com/the-edge-ai/i-only-date-guys-with-bloombe...

Yes, messaging is a fair point.

We plan to add interactive communities and messaging to Feather. We expect a large number of well-informed investors on our platform, so the conversation should be value-add for all.

And again, goes without saying but we offer the same high quality of data as Bloomberg et al. for 5 percent of the price, and our mission really is to enable you to take your investment performance to the next level, at a price that doesn't break the bank :)

> The key point to understand about Bloomberg is that it’s both a software product and a social network. The software product determined who would join the network, but the network is what keeps users there. It’s like a multiplayer video game, or Harvard: Sure, the quests and campus are useful, but people keep showing up because of the friends they’ve made or the connections they intend to make.

From https://marker.medium.com/why-its-hard-to-kill-the-bloomberg... which has a great overview of this point

1 - The alternatives mostly suck.

2 - The terminal isn't that expensive for folks that actually need it.

3 - Trading securities in most countries / professional institutions involves coordination of many parties. Their chat solves that in a very convenient way, globally.

4 - The terminal does a mind boggling amount of stuff, really. Every year someone claims they're launching a BBG killer with public SEC data, I can't even.

I was a SWE at Bloomberg for a few years. I don't think people appreciate the breadth of the platform; they employ something like six thousand engineers.

Others already mentioned chat etc and I would like to just add, Bloomberg is one of the largest electronic trading platform for certain financial products/markets (e.g. many types of swaps)

For institutions, Bloomberg has depth of relationships and frankly, maintaining the status quo tends to be low-risk, and therefore preferred, for management.

For retail traders, independent investment managers, etc., it makes no sense to pay $25,000 per year for data you can get with us for $99 per month. We're excited to bring this to market with Feather!

How about the added value of the chatrooms, which is a favourite whenever I talk to people using the terminals?

Yep, that's a fair point. We'll be building interactive communities as well. We expect our community to have many well-informed investors, and therefore expect the conversation to be value-add to everybody using Feather.

I mean here chat won't be as useful. The point with that chat is not the chat, it is the access to people who can spend 25k. Here you will only get normies who have nothing special to add.

Honestly, I’m skeptical that Bloomberg chat is really going to add much value to a random individual who springs for a Bloomberg terminal.

If you’re a bond trader at some bank and all the other bond traders are chatting on Bloomberg, you’re missing out. But they’re not going to chat with me even if I got myself a Bloomberg terminal.

Chat? And I think it's more than 10% of its value. Chat + price tag more precisely.

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