[dontscale]

I always suspected the cost was a function of the profits of the firms using them.

I think it is a smart move to force bundle the hardware and form the users' keystroke habits over a career. I imagine the switching costs are extreme.

I'm not a trader. I'm actually a programmer and just curious about a lot of things. One day, I contacted Thomson Reuters and asked to try their competing system, I think it was Elektron. It is a pure software system that I got bored with after a few days of exploring.

[gearhart]

Probably Eikon? Elektron is Reuters' real-time data play, Eikon has much more of the news/data/analysis functionality of BB. It's terrible marketing, even from their pages it's pretty hard to differentiate [1] [2]

[1] http://financial.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/data-analyti... [2] http://financial.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/tools-applic...

[dontscale]

Yep - that's the one. I remember it was slow and seemed to be built with either Java or Flash or something crazy.