[mattturck]

Yes, agreed. But the difficulty here is that a lot of those niches are very small, in terms of number of users. Assume for example you're building a product focused on munis, which I don't think is a very well covered niche for now. How many potential users are we talking about here? 20,000? A bit more maybe? Yet you need to build a whole technology platform to serve them. Only makes sense (from a venture perspective) if you use munis as a beachhead to expand into another area, but as it turns out, the next area requires you to pretty much start from scratch on a number of fronts, because it is going to be so specific. So building a large business here requires you to address a bunch of different niches and hire specific teams for each - lots of venture money required, IMHO.

[bane]

But the returns can still be good.

Let's say you do just that, snag half the market and get 10k users each paying you $500/mo for their niche.

That's still a $60m/yr business.

[antr]

As someone who has used Bloomberg's Terminal for 5 years: Bloomberg's sum of the parts product is far more valuable than the parts sold one by one - add to that the immediate top-knotch customer support 24/7/365 and breadth/depth of the data they have, Bloomberg is a killer product. IMHO, I really doubt any product decoupling will be of value to any of Bloomberg's current customers.

[bdunbar]

> to any of Bloomberg's current customers.

I'm not the only person to have thought about this - what about new guys who can use 'a Bloomberg' but can't afford the price? Is there a way forward for these guys to create new customers?

[antr]

Absolutely, there are many customers left out at +$20k a terminal per year. The questions is, which of Bloomberg's services they want the most. I wished I knew the answer.

[squigs25]

Regarding munis, Lumesis is trying to hack this space... Not sure what their penetration is, although I think there's potential here.