Between the Lines
You Can’t Kill the Bloomberg Terminal. But If You Were Going to Try, Here’s How.
Bloomberg is one of the best software companies in history, so good luck and best wishes
“I’m going to kill X” is usually a bad business idea. Generally, there are obvious reasons to kill it (it’s profitable, customers hate it), and there are nonobvious reasons nobody has succeeded yet.
Bloomberg is one of the best software companies in history, and it may be the single best service I’ve ever used — the user interface on the Bloomberg Terminal isn’t great, but the customer service is incredible. If it breaks or doesn’t do something you need, the company is willing to fix it or build it.
When people try to understand the Bloomberg Terminal as a product, what they often miss is that Bloomberg is a great business because it has low churn, and it has low churn because its IM function is basically an exclusive club of approximately 325,000 people whose employers think they are worth at least $25,000 per year above their base salary. Like any exclusive club, if you can get in, it’s assumed that you’re probably worth talking to.
There are some ways to make inroads into Bloomberg’s market. For example, Money.net is a solid…
