There are some good answers here about why BBG has become the de facto information tool for folks who work in finance. Speaking as someone who works in finance -- there are, in my opinion, opportunities to dethrone BBG, but the most effective attack vectors will be more niche markets where information can be easily digitized, organized, and presented in a way that beats BBG's interface.
I work with municipal bonds - long story short, the muni market is a fixed income market with several legal and structural characteristics which add complexity over the corporate and government bond markets.
For example - generally municipal bonds are structured with serial maturities and a 10 year par call option, which means issuers are constantly refinancing, paying bonds down with cash, etc. This introduces complexity around even knowing what bonds an issuer still has outstanding. To someone who works with corporates, you'd just pull up the ticker and immediately see what's there - for our market, it takes a lot of manual effort to track the bonds, digitize old documents, and present that information in a logical interface.
(Similar to the SEC's EDGAR, there is an information repository for the municipal market called EMMA, which was introduced post-crisis - so it is fairly easy to pull recent disclosures, but very difficult to track older bonds/documents.)
On the investment banking side, we have one Bloomberg terminal for our entire floor, since the subscription is fairly expensive and we don't have as much need for the info as the traders do. If a company were to simply track information about municipal bonds, starting with the largest issuers, they could undercut Bloomberg in this market and make a good chunk of subscription revenue.
I have to imagine these opportunities exist elsewhere as well. I doubt that there are many folks who use BBG functions for more than the handful of markets in which they participate. I bet that there are markets where smaller companies could do just as good a job as BBG at gathering information for a lower cost.
A thought I just had while typing this comment - to me, BBG seems analogous to a cable TV bundle, where you pay for a ton of channels that you don't use. I wonder if competing against BBG in single markets would motivate them to introduce tiered/a la carte subscription models? The one feature keeping everyone on Bloomberg is chat (and to a certain extent, the actual trading platform) - in my case, if we could have that while only subscribing to a few functions, that would probably be enough for us and could save on subscription costs.
I work with municipal bonds - long story short, the muni market is a fixed income market with several legal and structural characteristics which add complexity over the corporate and government bond markets.
For example - generally municipal bonds are structured with serial maturities and a 10 year par call option, which means issuers are constantly refinancing, paying bonds down with cash, etc. This introduces complexity around even knowing what bonds an issuer still has outstanding. To someone who works with corporates, you'd just pull up the ticker and immediately see what's there - for our market, it takes a lot of manual effort to track the bonds, digitize old documents, and present that information in a logical interface.
(Similar to the SEC's EDGAR, there is an information repository for the municipal market called EMMA, which was introduced post-crisis - so it is fairly easy to pull recent disclosures, but very difficult to track older bonds/documents.)
On the investment banking side, we have one Bloomberg terminal for our entire floor, since the subscription is fairly expensive and we don't have as much need for the info as the traders do. If a company were to simply track information about municipal bonds, starting with the largest issuers, they could undercut Bloomberg in this market and make a good chunk of subscription revenue.
I have to imagine these opportunities exist elsewhere as well. I doubt that there are many folks who use BBG functions for more than the handful of markets in which they participate. I bet that there are markets where smaller companies could do just as good a job as BBG at gathering information for a lower cost.
A thought I just had while typing this comment - to me, BBG seems analogous to a cable TV bundle, where you pay for a ton of channels that you don't use. I wonder if competing against BBG in single markets would motivate them to introduce tiered/a la carte subscription models? The one feature keeping everyone on Bloomberg is chat (and to a certain extent, the actual trading platform) - in my case, if we could have that while only subscribing to a few functions, that would probably be enough for us and could save on subscription costs.