Back home in Korea, when I first used a Bloomberg terminal, instantly I fell in love with it.
It enabled me to collect or edit almost any data from security to commodity to currency in the world. The more I played with it, the more I got addicted to it. At that time, I thought to myself it's totally worth 1,200 dollars a month ( well it didn't come from my pocket but my company's though )
As professor Cowan mentioned briefly last time, the success of Bloomberg is a phenomenon. It was the first one to package a vast amount of raw financial material and data, analysis and make it available on a computer terminal. It isn't just a machine, but a huge network where buyers and sellers could meet.
But recently, the new players are tapping into the market that Bloomberg is feeding on. They are companies like 'Quote.com', 'Stockpoint', 'Thomson Reuters' etc. These information companies are offering fragmentation of what Bloomberg provides for a fraction of the price and the services are getting more sophisticated.
Here is my news of today from Financial Times.
It is the story about the launch of a new service by Thompson Reuters. From now on, customers can access all best 'bid and offer' data to know whether they are getting the best deals. Maybe this can be an interesting game to watch.
After a long talk, again, I felt all the more keenly the importance of constant changes. It needs no repetition here but a newspaper or information companies, financial (whatever you call it) should be nimble and customer-focused not only to survive but to lead the industry.
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