One of the most interesting things about the Bloomberg terminal that never seems to get mentioned in all the coverage and commenting is that its UI is optimized for users who actually take the time to go through training.
In particular, everything is designed so that you never have to touch the mouse. If there are 20 choices onscreen, they'll all be numbered, and you type the number of the choice you want and press enter. This allows for incredibly fast interaction, but with a bit of a learning curve. And customers take the time to learn, because their peers and their boss emphasize how valuable that investment of time will be.
If the terminal were being introduced today, without that existing body of zealots to preach the value of getting over the initial learning curve, there's no way Bloomnberg could get away with it. The sales team would visit a potential customer, the customer's eyes would boggle at the UI, and Sales would come back to the office demanding a redesign that looks like Microsoft Office and is mouse-centric.
> its UI is optimized for users who actually take the time to go through training.
I read another take on Bloomberg terminal's dominance.
A (potential) competitor might look at the Bloomberg screens and think they could recreate that more cheaply with Angular, React.js, or some fancy GPU accelerated DirectX. Maybe they'll have interesting ideas like beaming price charts to Google Glass, Apple Watch, etc.
However, that's just looking at the surface level.
The thing that's very hard to duplicate is the relationships that Bloomberg has built up over the years with all the data providers to get you ultra low latency data feeds. That's hundreds of golf games and 3 martini lunches the competitor would have to duplicate to establish the relationships Bloomberg has. The programming of the hardware and GUI would be trivial compared to the wheeling & dealing that has to be done.
Well, the Terminal's UI when introduced in the early 1980s was cutting edge, but that meant text mode and keyboards - no GUIs or mice back then.
If being launched today, just like back then, it'd be designed to provide both as shallow as possible a learning curve for new users and power and speed for experts. In the 1980s that meant full-screen UI with numeric menus, Go codes, and custom hardware; today, that'd mean a discoverable point-and-click self-teaching GUI for the newbies, backed up by keyboard shortcuts, scripting, and a command bar for power users.
Looking at a video on YouTube of it, it seems it actually has a very modern search-based UI where you type something and it autocompletes/searches commands, and things are clickable by mouse too.
So for instance you type "Google" and it shows a bunch of Google-related stock ticker, you click one, then type "earnings" and it shows you some tools that allow you to learn about earnings, graph, project them, etc.
It doesn't look like you can do much better UI-wise even for beginners.
It seems substantially better than Google/Yahoo Finance though, so there could be a market for building a (ad-supported?) website that offers the most common tools with the same quality of the Bloomberg terminal.
One can always do better :) But yes, "autocomplete" (in Terminal parlance) has made discoverability much better. You can just start typing what you want and chances are you'll find what you're looking for right away. You can even ask it questions and it will answer the direct question for you if it can. (e.g. "What were Google's earnings?" takes you to the exact answer)
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One of the most interesting things about the Bloomberg terminal that never seems to get mentioned in all the coverage and commenting is that its UI is optimized for users who actually take the time to go through training.
In particular, everything is designed so that you never have to touch the mouse. If there are 20 choices onscreen, they'll all be numbered, and you type the number of the choice you want and press enter. This allows for incredibly fast interaction, but with a bit of a learning curve. And customers take the time to learn, because their peers and their boss emphasize how valuable that investment of time will be.
If the terminal were being introduced today, without that existing body of zealots to preach the value of getting over the initial learning curve, there's no way Bloomnberg could get away with it. The sales team would visit a potential customer, the customer's eyes would boggle at the UI, and Sales would come back to the office demanding a redesign that looks like Microsoft Office and is mouse-centric.
> its UI is optimized for users who actually take the time to go through training.
I read another take on Bloomberg terminal's dominance.
A (potential) competitor might look at the Bloomberg screens and think they could recreate that more cheaply with Angular, React.js, or some fancy GPU accelerated DirectX. Maybe they'll have interesting ideas like beaming price charts to Google Glass, Apple Watch, etc.
However, that's just looking at the surface level.
The thing that's very hard to duplicate is the relationships that Bloomberg has built up over the years with all the data providers to get you ultra low latency data feeds. That's hundreds of golf games and 3 martini lunches the competitor would have to duplicate to establish the relationships Bloomberg has. The programming of the hardware and GUI would be trivial compared to the wheeling & dealing that has to be done.
Well, the Terminal's UI when introduced in the early 1980s was cutting edge, but that meant text mode and keyboards - no GUIs or mice back then.
If being launched today, just like back then, it'd be designed to provide both as shallow as possible a learning curve for new users and power and speed for experts. In the 1980s that meant full-screen UI with numeric menus, Go codes, and custom hardware; today, that'd mean a discoverable point-and-click self-teaching GUI for the newbies, backed up by keyboard shortcuts, scripting, and a command bar for power users.
Much like Excel.
Looking at a video on YouTube of it, it seems it actually has a very modern search-based UI where you type something and it autocompletes/searches commands, and things are clickable by mouse too.
So for instance you type "Google" and it shows a bunch of Google-related stock ticker, you click one, then type "earnings" and it shows you some tools that allow you to learn about earnings, graph, project them, etc.
It doesn't look like you can do much better UI-wise even for beginners.
It seems substantially better than Google/Yahoo Finance though, so there could be a market for building a (ad-supported?) website that offers the most common tools with the same quality of the Bloomberg terminal.
One can always do better :) But yes, "autocomplete" (in Terminal parlance) has made discoverability much better. You can just start typing what you want and chances are you'll find what you're looking for right away. You can even ask it questions and it will answer the direct question for you if it can. (e.g. "What were Google's earnings?" takes you to the exact answer)
Honest question: doesn't it also have a lot to do with the technical sophistication of the typical user, not just lock-in?