Bloomberg sells one product on one price list: the Terminal, at roughly $30,000 a year per user with no discounts, to more than 300,000 subscribers, and it bundles news, analytics, trade execution and the messaging system traders use with each other. Michael Bloomberg founded it in 1981 with the $10 million severance he received when Salomon Brothers was sold, and Merrill Lynch's early investment and distribution created the first market. Readers get a subscription data business with genuine pricing power, sustained by a chat network that makes each additional subscriber more useful to the others. Bloomberg's own memoir is where the pricing and product decisions are explained, and Eleanor Randolph's biography covers the mayoralty alongside the company.
2 books