Bloomberg Terminal launch (1981)
Michael Bloomberg launched the Innovative Market Systems terminal in 1981, charging roughly $24,000 per year for a workstation that combined real-time bond pricing, news, and analytics. Salomon Brothers signed on as the anchor customer, validating the product. The terminal bundled data, workflow, and proprietary tooling into a single subscription.
Adoption spread across Salomon's competitors within years as traders found themselves unable to interoperate without the terminal.
More than 325,000 terminals are in use globally by the mid-2020s, generating tens of billions in annual revenue and entrenching Bloomberg as Wall Street's default infrastructure.
Anthropic is attempting a structurally similar play: bundle a model, third-party data, and workflow integration into a subscription that becomes infrastructure. The Moody's deal mirrors Bloomberg's data moat strategy.
