Vendor agreements are only part of it. We actually run one of the largest private networks in the world. There are huge fixed costs with just the physical logistics of the operation. On the data side, I was curious and checked.. The aggregate amount of incoming ticks/messages is upwards of 45 billion a day.
You are right, bloomberg is obviously in a different league. I meant there is an opportunity to offer market data to a different set of clients.
However, that is not to say that the size of bloomberg's infrastructure is the biggest obstacle to competing with it. Today there are technologies (nosql, HDFS, virtual clustures, etc.) which make it reasonable for ambitious engineers to think about competing with sections of bloomberg's business.
Bloomberg does have an immense, non-technical, advantage because traders often love their terminals. From the outside, it looks like an ugly, mainframe age technology with weird commands and ancient looking charts. But boy is it ever useful :) Proficient BB users would make vim users proud.
I'm honestly curious if 3rd party cloud pricing can allow competition that makes business sense, though. Maybe someone will attempt it..
As for the terminal, it is constantly evolving. Change takes time :) Mess with something that works and you might not like the outcome. Just ask Netflix ;)
I think it makes sense because someone can start an operation with few clients and limit infrastructure costs. As the number of clients grows, you can improve your infrastructure. By the time you get to thousands of customers, you can switch to bare-metal servers and dramatically improve your bottom line.
In other words, you don't need a big machine, expensive colocation, upfront bandwidth costs, just to serve two clients.
It's not a big enterprisey mish-mash if that's what you're thinking :) Everything has its place. Flash is used for the animated ipanels just because it is easier for the designers to use. (It also is used for IB video chat because of its easy hookup to the webcams installed on the box.) Silverlight is used for all the TV streaming because the live video streaming is built on top of WM smooth streaming tech. .NET is used as a hosting environment for bits and pieces such as the Bing maps integration. It is also how apps such as our dev IDE are run. I can log into any terminal anywhere in the world and run any of our internal stand-alone apps without admin rights. (And via any browser using BBA to login.)
