After reading threads like these[1]. I can't help but feel that MOST interfaces should indeed be like the bloomberg terminal - great example of security-focused, minimal latency and maximum functionality product.
Consider what you could do if you had a cloud-only multiplayer game engine with all players just receiving a low-latency video stream of their interface and local events being piped back up the same connection, but with some business application built on top. The ability to say that you no longer have a client-server contract and it's all just one big server implementation drops a massive number of design constraints and immediately makes the security and client interface to the system a trivial affair.
Obviously, the downsides with the above are the latency, bandwidth, and additional load seen at the server in order to render client views. But, these are really the only downsides, and none of them are extraordinarily complex in terms of technical resolution. Latency is probably the only hard constraint that cannot be resolved by simply increasing an existing resource. The other 2 can be resolved with More Money™. Everything else is upside from here.
Ok your comment is mindboggling to me. Having used Bloomberg for nearly 10 years, not only for the front-end but the back-end API I can tell you it is the most stable piece of software I've ever seen. Not once, not one single time has it crashed in those 10+ years for us. The API is even more impressive- to my knowledge we never even experience a single missed query or randomly dead data stream over all those years.
The terminal is expensive as hell, but they deliver on the cost.
Also just by the fact of how it's used, saying it constantly crashes and assuming it's just like that and traders are ok with that all day long? Whatever experience you seem to have must be an extreme outlier.
>It’s basically a giant piece of legacy code.
Eh I think that's silly. You even say it's designed for the power users, which is absolutly right. That's the only reason you think it's legacy. Are you telling me everything behind and their back-end is not extremely advanced? It has to be to support the amount of data that is flowing through them at every second in data that HAS to be fast & accurate.
Maybe you know the answer to a question I’ve been asking for years: is there any way to authenticate the data you receive over the API? Bloomberg requires credentials to prove you have a subscription but I’ve long wondered about the security/integrity of the data flowing the other direction. What mechanism stops a bad actor from slightly altering or delaying Bloomberg API data as a way to manipulate the markets?
They do, they just don't know it, yet. If you showed them two versions of Facebook, one which was their normal latent mess, and one which had half the latency, they'll take the less-latent version every single time.
Don't assume that people don't care - they definitely do, they just don't have a choice.