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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 29.0 ms ] threadWhat, not enough white space, animations, and shitty, obscure menus for you? Or maybe they need Material 69 or Liquid Glass?
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.
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.
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.