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This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, subscribe “We never made the error that so many others have: mistaking their product for the device that delivers it.”   — Michael Bloomberg I’m old enough to remember when a Bloomberg Terminal was a stand-alone box wedged onto a cluttered trading desk between a dual-receiver phone and a clacking machine for time-stamping order tickets. The chunky keyboard had colorful buttons for the most-used functions, a squawk-box speaker, and a fun roller ball that made navigating the Terminal feel like playing Missile Command (an arcade game found in 1980s bowling alleys and pizza parlors that I was extremely good at). Soon, though, the Bloomberg “terminal” was just software, displayed on the same screen as your trading system, using the same keyboard you used for everything else. That made it seem less special to me, which I thought would make it less valuable, too — if all the financial news and market prices could be displayed directly on my regular computer screens, surely anyone could provide it? Michael Bloomberg knew otherwise.  Bloomberg never confused the product he was selling (information) with the device that delivered it (a chunky, colorful box) — so when a better delivery mechanism came along, he was quick to embrace it. As a result, Bloomberg Terminals soon became as ubiquitous on trading desks as empty coffee cups and Patagonia vests. There are many counterexamples. Kodak thought its product was rolls of film, so it ignored the digital camera (despite inventing it, even). Its actual product, it turned out, was preserving memories, and digital cameras (and now phones) are better devices to deliver it. Newspaper publishers thought their product was a physical paper delivered to your door, but that was just the delivery mechanism. The real product was…

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Filed under: News - @ October 8, 2025 7:28 pm