What if Bloomberg made a "new UI", which you could easily toggle to/from, for the benefit of the people who don't like the current UI? Over time the number of people who use the current UI would become a smaller and smaller share of their customer base, and in like, 30 years, they could turn the old UI off.
There was an experiment where they introduced "B2" which was a redesigned terminal and it looked and felt much more like a web browser. People hated it. They moved it to an opt-in feature. No one (except internal BB engineers) used it for years so they eventually stopped adding features. Then after another few years they stopped supporting it. Then semi-recently (within 2 years) they shut it off completely. No one was willing to switch. Now they just rollout small changes incrementally (much better approach anyway).
Why would they though? If their customer retention is already super high, the only reason to make an onboarding curve more shallow would be to acquire new users.
Given there's already a social appeal to getting a Bloomberg Terminal, why would they invest the development time/dollars? What's their ROI?
Hi -- just wanted to say that there's a lot of armchair theorizing in this particular thread of discussion. I'm directly involved in building the product and the most succinct way I would personally summarize it is that the service (not product) is a subscription. Customers are not only paying for value derived from the current product but from the near-constant (~24/6) evolution and development of it (thousands of engineers spread across many timezones), and 24/7 monitoring of it. Or another way to think of it... what's Mercedes' ROI for improving their luxury cars? It's already a best-of-breed luxury car -- they could just do nothing, right?
Success hides problems though. If through some unforeseen means a competitor were to arise in 5-10 years who happened to have a better UI that works for a wider range of people, then spending 35 years saying “They can’t choose anyone but us! Let them eat CLI arguments!” is going to look pretty silly.
If it would cost a tiny, tiny fraction of their revenue to shore up their UI to make it harder for a future competitor to disrupt them, that seems like a worthy use of money.
One thing people fail to realise is while not initially intuitive once you get used to it the Bloomberg UX becomes muscle memory to instantly load (they force all but the smallest customers onto leased lines) exactly the data you wanted in a dense consistent (UX on any remotely popular function is reviewed and guidelines enforced) easy to read form.
this. bloomberg terminal is an expert friendly system. it’s not optimized for high conversion rates and casual stickiness, it’s optimized for the productivity of people who are willing to spend the time building the muscle memory.
While I kind of agree, I think it goes against the culture of exclusivity. Generally speaking, goods that are valued because they are exclusive are not strategically better off by making that product accessible to more users. Burberry is a great example of this and how bad it can be for the company.
if you want to hire and retain highly talented folks they would want to work on new tech and product philosophies ?
Doesn’t that benefit the company long term ?
There maybe two distinct markets and Bloomberg can captilize on both perhaps ?
The newer UI could be built as completely new platform “Bloomberg lite“ targeted towards say folks who can only pay 10,000 USD per year or only say currency traders or whatever ?
If interest starts tilting in the favour of newer version you can slowly add features to near parity while moving the older version even more expensive bracket and getting the newer version closer to old pricing ?
If enough people don’t want the new one you try again something different in a couple of years , until you get it right .
The problem with bloomberg lite is many of those users are now paying $10k instead of $25k.
For years their major customers tried to force them into offering an Instant Bloomberg (IM) only license because senior traders insisted their PAs had it. It was only after several senior banks (whenever a single bank had tried the top talent threatened to quit) forced their users to use symphony that Bloomberg relented.
Yes to start with, you differentiate the value by giviing limited features at lower price point so people who need everything clearly not going to be interested.
If there is enough interest on the new product you add features to new version and start hiking the price of both so relative price difference remains similar. There will not be a negative impact on revenue in that approach
You could grow the new product in a different direction completely for whole new user who are ready to pay 10,000 but not 25,000. The 25k terminal is still aspirational and exclusive as it is now, if the premise that people are paying for the exclusive network is true both products can work on their own and 10k community can feed into 25k on, if not well there was never a moat to protect in the first place.
The thing you miss is the ecosystem tie and just how many users could get by with only the base functionality.
i.e. Paying $25k for an IM system for a PA or some basic trade management functionality for a middle office analyst is ludicrous.
But you're also not going to force the trader bringing in millions to run 5 different systems when he knows Bloomberg can do it all and your competitor would give it to him.
Bloomberg has a steep learning curve but it's amazing once you've worked for it for a few months. I can access the most exotic functions or sub menus by just typing in a string of numbers. I don't think any other software allows you to already select menus on a page that hasn't even loaded yet. Changing anything is a huge annoyance for users.
There have been a few newer functions that don't allow accessing everything by number shortcut and they're certainly not the most favourite parts of the terminal.
Seems like making the interface more accessible would defeat a part of the lock-in that makes the product so valuable. People already want to become Bloomberg Terminal users, the UI is "good enough", and once you're good at it, it's a sunk cost.
Yes. It’s taken half a decade and many increasingly forceful nudges to get about half of the customers over to the new UI.
This despite the fact that new features haven’t been released to the classic version for at least 3 years. Not only are they on a dated UI, they’re missing every single new feature that’s been released for several years (and that’s actually a shit load of features).
