No Cussing on Bloomberg
No one would be shocked to hear profanity on Wall Street from the trading floor to the boardroom. Everywhere that is except the main avenue of communication: the Bloomberg terminal.
For more than 25 years the platform that investment professionals use to get prices, news and communicate has blocked profanity. Here is the backstory:
Bloomberg developed an innovative proprietary email system in the early 1990s which allowed any user of the system to email any other.
For an admittedly steep price (currently $30,000 a year) you got access to a gated community – a digital Rolodex – of anyone that mattered in finance.
It included features that let you retract a message and see if the person had read it which didn’t show up in consumer apps for another 20 years
But with great power comes responsibility and by the late 1990s there were some concerns that the message system posed a risk of facilitating inappropriate communication.
The tipping point involved a message sent by a Goldman Sachs trader. It was brought to the attention of executives and eventually Mike Bloomberg who made a snap decision.
He decided one weekend to turn clients on to a system that had been developed internally to block swear words. The list was an assortment he and some programmers came up with.
That Monday, without warning, when traders came in and began to express themselves they got a pop up saying the following “word(s) or phrase(s) are inappropriate for business use.”
Chaos ensued as traders flooded the Bloomberg help desk with complaints. It quickly became clear this was an executive decision with no appeal.
Traders then changed course and started testing the perimeter, looking for holes in the wall to find words that should be banned but were not.
According to a front-page article on the Wall Street Journal detailing the melee, one such word they found was the Spanish word for prostitute.
Others took a more humorously collaborative approach and sent messages to Mike directly suggesting words he should add to the list.
Mike knew people would skirt the rules by adding symbols for letters. But the point was never really to bar swearing – it was to get people to pause.
According to Jeff Cohen, who was the head of sales in New York at the time, the decision made business and strategic sense.
Jeff told me Mike understood that the user and the customer are sometimes different. In this case, the user was the irritated trader. The actual customer was the big Wall Street firm that wanted to limit legal risk.
The block on profanity has become – like the $1.50 hotdog at Costco – a defining part of the product and company culture.
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been enhancements. Words have been added to the banned list, for example.
Remember that Spanish word for prostitute. You can’t use that anymore.
(Part of a series of lessons I learned from three decades at Bloomberg.)
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