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Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky–Everyone Still Uses It

35 points by haebom ago | 11 comments

ggm |next [-]

It's Emacs. Well.. not exactly but I bet an Emacs user would Very quickly feel at home.

"The ui is hard to learn" is a selling feature not a problem. It's like sabre or amadeus: it helps the industry keep out time wasters and maximises the agents sense of skill and value.

The socialised effect of "trade in Bloomberg or get a worse deal" probably makes the alternatives very niche.

If something like the LME had developed a terminal I could see it having the same value to it's community, or the bank settlement systems. Something used by most of your cohort, easier to stay inside it.

It's contract enforced API access. Illegal scrapers risk being excluded. If you pay the fees you get the spec apparently.

GianFabien |root |parent [-]

Have worked with Sabre and early GUI interfaces for travel agents. It has only taken 30 years for WebJet to deliver something consumers could use and has displaced swathes of travel agents.

sakopov |next |previous [-]

BT's moat is data. 40 years of data engineering, building relationship with data providers, consuming direct exchange feeds, building proprietary data sets, normalizing and cleaning decades of historical data. Displacing BT is a gargantuan effort.

wiseowise |next |previous [-]

> Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky

What, not enough white space, animations, and shitty, obscure menus for you? Or maybe they need Material 69 or Liquid Glass?

cmacleod4 |root |parent [-]

The target market is "power users" who want maximum functionality and don't care much about prettiness.

I used to work on some of the code behind those "clunky" screens. I would say that Bloomberg UIs generally do quite a good job of making the functionality scale - you can do basic stuff quickly with sensible defaults, but when you need more sophistication the UI lets you dig deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

haebom |next |previous [-]

You’re supposed to read the post before commenting, right? Do some people just read the title and leave a comment?

brianwawok |root |parent [-]

Welcome to hacker news

Havoc |next |previous [-]

There is an opensource copy but the network effects at play both on data and chat mean it’ll never be more than a toy.

Fun fact- Country with highest terminal density per person? Vatican. Hail Mamon

palmotea |root |parent [-]

> Fun fact- Country with highest terminal density per person? Vatican. Hail Mamon

That's just the quirky result of a global organization having its headquarters being a sovereign state with a tiny population. The error is treating it like a regular country, which it is not. It's an extremely unusual country.

jmclnx |previous [-]

I remember hearing a few years ago the Bloomberg Terminal was "redone" to be Windows based. Is that true ? Or do they still run on top of their own OS.

I would have thought if they would have move anywhere, it would have been to Linux or maybe even a *BSD to avoid the GPL.

cmacleod4 |root |parent [-]

The Bloomberg Terminal started as dedicated hardware, but it has been Windows-based software for at least 20 years. At one time a Solaris-based version was developed, but that never took off and was dropped. These days there are plenty of Linux servers running back-end code in the Bloomberg data centres, but I've not heard of any plan to support Linux on the front-end.