Surprised this article mentioned chat only once. The secret sauce to Bloomberg's stickiness is their collaboration features via what's know as Instant Bloomberg.
I've got a Symphony account. It's okay I guess, but Bloomberg has the network effect, and that's a very difficult thing to overcome because for at least some period of time you'll be asking people to use multiple communication platforms, at which point, some of them will just revert to their original platform.
I would have to guess once Symphony is proven some of the banks will strongly encourage/require communication with their traders to go through Symphony. or it might be another failed Bloomberg-killer. Will be interesting.
I don't think the first commercial Bloomberg terminal was in 1982, but I could be wrong. Michael Bloomberg was still at Salomon until mid-1981. Maybe there was a prototype sometime in 1982. Merrill didn't invest until 1983 and that's where the early terminal got all the bond data. I don't think it was a big factor in the market until like 88-ish, Salomon launched their Yield Book project to compete around 1988-89. There was some kind of an exclusive with Merrill and/or bad blood with Salomon and they couldn't even buy a terminal.
Here's an article about a bunch of banks actually working together to unseat Bloomberg's chat: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/21/banks-back-rival-to-bloomberg...