By Piero Cingari
Publication Date: 2026-03-01 15:31:00
For decades, the Bloomberg L.P. Terminal has been the undisputed operating system of global finance.
Walk onto any trading floor in New York, London, or Hong Kong and you’ll see it glowing in black and amber. It’s more than software — it’s infrastructure.
The Terminal doesn’t just provide data; it provides identity. Thousands of keyboard shortcuts. Proprietary functions. Instant messaging between traders, analysts, and dealmakers. Real-time feeds licensed from exchanges across the globe.
At nearly $30,000 per year per seat, the price has never been trivial.
But the switching cost was never really about money. It was about habit and network.
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That dominance generated $12.6 billion in annual revenue last year — largely from terminal subscriptions.
But that reign may be starting to crack.
On Wednesday, Perplexity AI introduced a new product called “Computer.”
It’s not just another chatbot.
According to the company, Computer can research, design, code, deploy, and manage projects end-to-end. It automatically selects the best model for each task — Claude for reasoning, Gemini for research, Grok for speed — and can operate autonomously in the background for hours or even days.
In a post on X, Perplexity described it as “what a personal computer in 2026 should be” — personal, persistent, secure by default, with hundreds of connectors, memory, file access, and web integration built into its infrastructure.
That’s ambitious.
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