Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky–Everyone Still Uses It

haebom 34 points 10 comments July 04, 2026
oztalking.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

ggm

It's Emacs. Well.. not exactly but I bet an Emacs user would Very quickly feel at home. "The ui is hard to learn" is a selling feature not a problem. It's like sabre or amadeus: it helps the industry keep out time wasters and maximises the agents sense of skill and value. The socialised effect of "trade in Bloomberg or get a worse deal" probably makes the alternatives very niche. If something like the LME had developed a terminal I could see it having the same value to it's community, or the bank settlement systems. Something used by most of your cohort, easier to stay inside it. It's contract enforced API access. Illegal scrapers risk being excluded. If you pay the fees you get the spec apparently.

sakopov

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.

wiseowise

> Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky What, not enough white space, animations, and shitty, obscure menus for you? Or maybe they need Material 69 or Liquid Glass?

jmclnx

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.

haebom

You’re supposed to read the post before commenting, right? Do some people just read the title and leave a comment?

Havoc

There is an opensource copy but the network effects at play both on data and chat mean it’ll never be more than a toy. Fun fact- Country with highest terminal density per person? Vatican. Hail Mamon

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