In His Own Words: Q&A with Bloomberg Cofounder Thomas Secunda

Editor's Note: The marketplace has changed dramatically since Bloomberg was founded. Today, the Wall Street's front office is completely dependent on technology, but it wasn't always that way, Secunda notes.

Secunda: The invention of the PC and the Internet has made a dramatic change in people. Today you might still find CEOs that don't have computers on their desk, but you won't find a trader in the world that doesn't have a computer on his or her desk. When we started, we built our own database packages, but we use packages now. We didn't want to be a hardware company, but we had no choice but to be a hardware company initially. The minute we didn't have to be, we could take that resource and move it to software and move it to customer service.

Bloomberg: Not a Technology Company

Some people think of us as a media company, and we do a lot in media. Some people think of us as a technology company, and we do a lot with technology. But we're basically a service company. On the financial product side of the company, the company that sells the terminal and our data licenses, all our products have a purpose, and we sell the purpose, not the technology that gets us to the purpose. There are all kinds of things that have been thought out over the last 25, 30 years that put us in a position where we can rapidly develop code and yet not have exposure to failure, because as you become a more mature firm, customers rely on you more and more, and the better you become, the better they expect you to become. We've built this real-time architecture, and of course we have to teach people how to use it, or they don't get the advantage of the rapid development system that we've built. Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio

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