October 14, 2002
Information Search

So I was musing at the bottom of an email message with a question...

Q: By the way, when did "freelance" acquire its modern meaning? Do we blame this on Sir Walter Scott and the romantic revival?

And the answer that came back was...

A: According to the OED function on Bloomberg, it looks like freelance in the literary/journalistic sense was well-established on Fleet Street by around 1880.

Two things about this exchange seem to me to be of interest:

  • First of all, Bloomberg's market feed has an "O[xford] E[nglish] D[ictionary] function? This would seem to me to be far from their core competency. I wonder how much Oxford University gets from Bloomberg for this.
  • Second of all, as I wrote my original email (and as I read the reply), my own OED was in the next room. But walk to the next room, pull the thing off the shelf, look for the magnifying glass, find and read the entry for "freelance"... that would have taken perhaps ten times as long as using the "OED" function on "freeelance" at your computer.

There are interesting lessons here, I think, if I were smart enough to figure them out.

Posted by DeLong at October 14, 2002 10:02 AM | Trackback
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A Bloomberg terminal costs ~$2,000/month. It provides prices, histories and analytics for every conceivable financial instrument, in addition to 1,092 news feeds.

It includes, almost parenthetically, more than a dozen foreign language dictionaries, as well as the OED.

The thousands of Bloomberg terminals around the globe throw off staggering amounts of cash, giving Mayor Bloomberg's employees plenty of resources with which to constantly improve their product.

Interestingly, despite its steep price, the Bloomberg terminal is now the "ante" to be in the capital markets game. Reuters is an also-ran, except in highly specialized market making niches. Contra-Microsoft, whose overt business model is proprietary lock-in, Bloomberg has steadily opened its platform to different hardware systems, and even allows one to download its precious data (as long as you don't sell it, of course).

I've always been struck by how different the Bloomberg/Gates approaches have led to similar-sized fortunes.

Posted by: George Zachar on October 15, 2002 10:19 AM
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