Yeah, my reply’s a bit tongue-in-cheek. I don’t really oppose monopolies per se – it’s a free market, a better product could compete and win.

But one of the Bloomberg’s main selling points, at least from the last discussion I’ve read on HN (and some of the comments here too), is the chat, which means there’s network effects at play. So you can’t just build a better terminal, you also have to convince the majority to switch.

(Though apparently Bloomberg Chat also supports email? Maybe the competitor can use that to interface with it, so it’s only “green bubble” bad, not “all your colleagues are there and you’re not” bad.)