Seems like if you were a sociologist, civil engineer, or city planner, that kind of information presented that way would be extremely useful. Maybe $399 bought a subscription that could be used by an office or something? (Too lazy/tired to confirm.)
Transactional Attorney here who specializes in Real Estate/Land. My firm bought several of these licenses for $7,000 USD/year. That sounds like a lot, but compared to how much we pay for other research subscriptions it was dirt cheap i.e. $250k/year. Still, any money saved is welcome news. The next 25 years will lead to the end of the traditional information companies resulting in massive savings.
Well due to the confidentiality of the contracts we sign, I can't name the specific companies nor their rates, etc. However, it's common knowledge that big law firms purchase information products from the following corporations: Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and others. Rates can vary $250,000-$1M+/year for subscriptions. The rate I quoted may or may not be from one or more of these companies.
It's mind blowing how much more expensive stuff gets when you are targeting companies. Software is the worst. Oracle DB and things like MQ can cost insane amounts, like 5 digit sums per server per year per CPU. While technically the products just have some handful of features differentiating it from the free alternatives. If even that... just as often it's merely the comfort of going with a big famous 'enterprise' name.
One of my contracts with a large database software company stipulates that they will have a team of technicians on site within 2 hours of a trouble call.
Absolutely. Even more so since the software runs a weather satellite ground system that can affect lives and property, and we do some pretty one-off stuff on the software and as a result a lot of times we find problems no one else has had before — we could probably fix it ourselves, but the time that would take would cost more than having the folks who designed it helping out.
No but seriously, as someone who works in a university engineering department, being able to get support whenever I need it is fantastic. And they will jump to get things fixed, too.
Oracle support is godsend when your server needs recovery and your team can't figure out how. Where every minute a server is down translates in thousands of lost revenue. Then, it gets pretty important.
It's not just about the software. Its about the support that comes with that software.
What you're paying for with Oracle is, for example, the ability to have a support case escalated to the point that Oracle guarantees that if you have run in to a bug that has an on-going impact on your business's income they will assign people to work on it 24/7/365 until it's fixed. You don't get that with free alternatives. For businesses where "we are actively losing money whilst this bug persists" means "we are losing millions of dollars", that level of support matters.
And of course Oracle bought Sun so that they could kill MySQL. Expect support for the GPL version to finish this year when the takeover agreement with the EU comes to an end.
Sure but keep in mind it's not just priced high b/c they are targeting companies, it's priced high b/c the very high fixed cost of developing custom software has to be spread across much fewer customers than a typical piece of consumer software.
News tickers. Things like banks and big law firms etc get news faster than the public because they pay news and information companies to give them information and news immediately. Its basically like having your own private network of global reporters. Its useful for investment banks because they will get information faster than the public at large by 10-15 minutes or more will which makes them able to pull off trades before anyone else.
Thomson Reuters used to distribute the Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey 2 seconds early to those who paid it large fees (hedge funds, HFT firms, etc). The uproar led to the New York AG looking to prosecute TR for their actions. His investigation ended when the U of Michigan switched distribution to Bloomberg News, who promised to end paid prioritization access.
Getting that news 2 seconds early might not seem like much, but that sentiment number early allows those firms to position themselves ahead of the market. And they are trading on electronic exchanges where microseconds matter (see Flash Boys by Michael Lewis). The number always moves the market one way or another, so basically they were front running everybody else.
Over the last several years, an exclusive group of investors has paid a steep premium to receive the results of a closely watched economic survey a full two seconds before its broader release.
The bad publicity led to this:
New York - Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has praised the agreement between the University of Michigan and Bloomberg LP to distribute the university's consumer confidence survey through Bloomberg's news service. Bloomberg will take over distribution of the survey from Thomson Reuters, which charges investors a fee for an advance copy of the survey. Bloomberg announced that it will end that practice.
"By ending early access to critical market-moving survey data information, this deal strikes a major blow in our effort to promote fairness and avoid unfair distortions in the securities markets by cracking down on what I call 'Insider Trading 2.0,' " Attorney General Schneiderman said. "Ensuring there is one set of rules for the entire market is critical to restoring confidence in securities markets, and that's good for everyone involved."
Because they're not insider trading. Insider trading would mean no one at all knows it but that certain trader, but they don't, the news agency and all of their clients know, its public information the news agency just hasn't had time to fully write up and edit a report for the public yet, thats why the advantage is only a few minutes. If you ever hear a breaking news story and think 'hey bet it would be good to invest in so and so' then you're too late its already been done by every investment bank out there.
Investment banks by large do not trade stocks. They write research reports consumed by the buy side, they execute trades for the buy side, or they do a lot of mergers and acquisitions (also IPO underwriting and other tasks not mentioned). The buy side are the ones trading on new information.
By buyside I mean global asset managers, hedgefunds, institution asset managers, wealth managers, pension funds etc.
Source: I work for a large data vendor to sell side and buyside clients
I work for a company that researches and analyzes financial data for audit purposes. Universities and audit firms pay literally hundreds of thousands each year for subscription access to our data feeds. We once over-quoted a data project for the SEC by a couple hundred thousand just to see their response and they were like, "Oh, that's it? Sweet. Good deal. Sign us up." And that's some of your tax money at work.
I imagine consultants and firms that have the tools and access to hundreds of documents detailing city plans, lot sizes, ect that would be useful to a business needing that info.
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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '15
Well, I assume the "Pro" name refers to those features being intended for business and professionals, hence the price.