Can Mike Bloomberg, self-made man's man and master of the real-time financial news universe, learn to think out of the box?

"My daughter is tall and busty and blonde," Michael Bloomberg is telling a table of Boston College graduates. "We went to China together. And what's a 16-year-old going to do on a business trip?" He pops another carefully buttered piece of bread in his mouth. "So I got her dates in every city in China." Remembering that I'm also at the table, he glares in my direction. "That's off the record!" he barks. It's typical Mike Bloomberg, wanting to have it both ways: imperious man of the people, coarse billionaire, earthy business leader, accessible control freak.

The alumni dinner at the New York Hilton, where Bloomberg is the keynote speaker, is in keeping with this media mogul's preferred persona. Amid the grandeur of the hotel's banquet hall, there is a tattiness befitting a man who claims to hate pretension, who speaks every day to his mother (still living, he tells the group proudly, "in the house we grew up in"). Bloomberg - a trim 5' 9", thinning brown hair streaked by silver, dressed in Wall Street's uniform of starched white shirt under pinstripe Paul Stuart suit - lectures the crowd on the perils of seductive technology, like a high school instructor. "We are replacing teachers with television, and we are relying on numbers in the workplace to tell us what to do. We are getting carried away by technology, by the tools."

The audience - mostly young Wall Street traders - is smitten. "He has the kind of energy that doesn't exist out there anymore," one budding financier gushes. The contradiction eludes them: In 18 years, Mike Bloomberg has turned himself into a baron of real-time financial information and news, building from a $10 million severance check a $2 billion-plus business structured around the very technology he's warning against. With more than 100,000 users around the world, the Bloomberg, as his eponymous product is known, has become Wall Street's most indispensable tool, delivering real-time data on more than 800,000 stocks and bonds, a rich array of historical information, and 4,500 original daily news stories to the likes of SEC chair Arthur Levitt, Bundesbank head Hans Tietmeyer, Disney CEO Michael Eisner, and Bill Gates, to name just a few celebrity clients. Yet while Bloomberg has become the establishment, he maintains the aura of the new kid on the block, projecting an image that's equal parts Horatio Alger and Warren Buffett: self-made, forthright, a change agent who's suspicious of hype. "The one thing computers have done," he continues, "is let us make bigger mistakes. We have to be careful not to depend on our machines."

"Mike sometimes wonders if he's a genius, or merely a guy who had one good idea."

But Mike Bloomberg needs to pay closer attention to his own words, for he, too, has become overly dependent on machines - his own. By forcing his customers to take a one-size-fits-all product, this self-styled information revolutionary risks becoming an anachronism in the era of the Internet - when technology is allowing others cheaper, if lesser, alternatives. At Bloomberg LP's very apogee, with an annual growth rate holding at close to 30 percent even while the Dow flirts erratically with gravity, there are portentous rumblings on Wall Street, as people begin to wonder if their hero has become a has-been.

Andrew Delaney, the editor in chief at Waters Information Services, which tracks the financial information industry, recalls a lavish Bloomberg party a year ago at the Whitney Museum in New York, where waiters were "walking around with open laptops on their arms, and caviar bowls on them. It was out of the 1980s.

"But when the going gets tough, that's going to stop," Delaney predicts. "When you have a kid producing $20 million a year, give him three Bloombergs. But when that number goes negative, the Bloombergs will go."

The financial world has changed strikingly since 1982, when Mike Bloomberg installed his first terminal. Back then, Bloomberg was a flamboyant pretender with a revolutionary system for making "real time" real. His innovation: a machine to deliver information on bond prices and models for comparing those prices, helping traders decipher the "fair value" of securities, a process that had been time-consuming and often inaccurate.

Bloomberg remedied the situation by delivering the elusive information instantaneously, offering his machine (named, with characteristic hubris, for himself) as a level field on which buyers and sellers could meet, breaking the lock the "sell side" had on pricing bonds. He later expanded his formula to include the pricing of stocks, and evolved his offerings to enable traders, analysts, investors, bankers, and others to scrutinize just about any security, commodity, or currency in the world - using news, historical data, and sophisticated analytic tools.

The Bloomberg is no longer just a terminal. It is a network, delivering information to 85 percent of the Fortune 500 companies, the Federal Reserve, the White House, the Vatican, central banks in South America, Europe, and Asia, hedge and mutual fund managers - an exclusive online community of global market- and moneymakers, each of whom pays a $1,600-per-month membership (for the first box, with a minimum two-year commitment; each additional box costs $1,225). This is the heart of Bloomberg's market: the 300,000 or so people around the world who require, and thus far have been able to afford, the highest end of financial information.

But the late '90s mark the start of another transition in the way finance is conducted: the arrival of open systems that run over the Internet and can function on any platform and operating system. In this new world, the barriers to entry are falling; it is no longer necessary to install a customized terminal or build a special computer network to deliver financial data. Consequently, a new breed of renegades is nipping at Bloomberg's heels, much as Bloomberg took on once-venerable companies like Dow Jones and Reuters.

More than a simple product, the Bloomberg is an environment, the financial equivalent of the fabled Library of Alexandria.

These new players are tapping into a larger market of financial professionals who don't do large volumes of trades every day, yet need to track the markets: pension fund managers, small retail brokers, corporate research departments, and high net-worth investors. Then there's the largest market of all: the millions of people with investments in mutual funds, 401(k) retirement plans, and online brokerage accounts. To them, companies like Quote.com, Stockpoint, and Data Broadcasting Corporation are offering fragments of what Bloomberg provides, for a fraction of the price. These miniature Bloomberg killers argue that when profits come down, it's going to be harder for clients who use only a portion of the Bloomberg database to justify the expense of a Bloomberg.

The new competitors have few offerings remotely close to the Bloomberg's sophistication, and those products that come closest measure their users in three or four digits. Yet the danger for Bloomberg is simple enough. The Internet-based information providers are fomenting an arms race to provide ever more value for a diminishing price. Whether these guerrilla information companies can survive is an open question, but along the way either to self-destruction or victory, they are pressuring Bloomberg to lower his prices or lose his audience. Much as mainframes became a "velvet cage" for IBM in the 1970s, the one-size-fits-all Bloomberg has put its own kingdom at risk.

Bloomberg's stated strategy until recently had been to do virtually nothing and wait out the new competition. "If you buy us for publicly available data, then we are in big trouble," he says, "Fortunately, that is not why most people spend $1,200 a month for our terminal." The rigidity of the business model derives straight from Mike Bloomberg's personality. A private company with 4,600 employees, Bloomberg LP is a patriarchy, with its founder the undisputed leader. Diversifying into a broad range of financial products threatens the core culture of the company, a family where all look to Mike for guidance.

His close friends - perhaps even Bloomberg himself - see the conundrum. "Mike sometimes wonders if he's a genius," says one friend, "or merely a guy who had one good idea."

Mike Bloomberg's life is conducted a world away from the frayed humility of Boston College alumni gatherings. He hosts notable-studded dinner parties several times a month at his Upper East Side townhouse, a dark, regal, antiques-filled dwelling designed by celebrity decorator Jamie Drake, whose other clients have included Madonna. "He will have a couple of media-baron types over, and a couple of old friends who are incredibly rich," says one friend who's attended more than a few. Along with the media czars will be "a combination of a large hedge fund manager like Michael Steinhardt, the guy who runs Lazard Frères, and then a writer."

Mike's current girlfriend, a romance novelist in her 50s named Mary Jane Salk, is often in attendance. His ex-wife Sue and her live-in boyfriend are also reportedly sharing the house, at least temporarily. "He gave his ex-wife a gazillion dollars," one friend says, "so how could it not be amicable?" But there is nothing new-mannish about a Bloomberg soirée, says author Fran Lebowitz, who calls dinner at Mike's a window into a high-testosterone world dominated by the host's "commanding presence and toughness."

"He can probably have his pick of women," she says. "To be a rich guy in Manhattan is like being captain of the football team in high school."

But everything you really need to know about the 57-year-old power broker, say his intimates, can be found in the office. "Now he is pursued by these media stars," says one. "But he is not fooled by that. His real friends are his old Wall Street friends."

Mike's 5-foot-long brown desk on the 15th floor of 499 Park Avenue, a thin black skyscraper on the northern end of midtown Manhattan, is also surrounded by flash and glitter, but it's of a decidedly nonsocial kind. Step off the elevator at Bloomberg and you're greeted with a cavalcade of energy. Everywhere there are flat-panel Bloomberg terminals displaying market data, news stories, and video feeds. Employees mill about the free snack bar while Bloomberg TV and Bloomberg Radio reporters produce stories at their desks. While celebrities abound, they're generally making their way to Charlie Rose's studio, provided gratis by Bloomberg to the PBS talk-show host. Mike sits at a desk on the "floor" right above the studio, overlooking the action, emulating the style of Wall Street.

The similarity isn't accidental. While Bloomberg owns a cable TV network, a New York radio station, three glossy magazines, and a wire service in addition to his desktop tool, his company's culture derives from what a close associate calls the "male-dominated, aggressive, confrontational environment" of traders.

In the hard-driving trader culture that characterized Salomon Brothers, Mike Bloomberg, almost from the moment he joined in 1966 as a 24-year-old Harvard Business School graduate, was more driven than most. He made a point of arriving every day at 7 a.m., the second at work after Billy Salomon, the firm's chair, and the last to leave, alongside John Gutfreund, the number-two partner. By 1972, Bloomberg had risen to partner, specializing in equities. His claim to fame was helping pioneer the use of "block trades," encouraging Salomon to pool shares in take-it-or-leave-it offerings, which helped increase the volume of the stock market and end the Street's once gentlemanly demeanor.

In 1979 Salomon asked Bloomberg, whose undergraduate major at Johns Hopkins had been engineering, to take charge of information systems. Managing a large, innovative technology project, Bloomberg chanced upon an insight that now seems commonplace: In a world where information begets money, speed is essential. But running the project, with his own fiefdom and budget, caused friction between Bloomberg and other partners. In 1981, at a company retreat in Tarrytown, New York, where Salomon's acquisition by Phibro Corporation was announced to a roomful of surprised partners, Mike Bloomberg, by a unanimous vote, was fired. That night, returning to Manhattan, he decided to buy his wife, Sue, a sable coat. On his last day at work, he brought it home, to ease her worries. The next day, he founded Bloomberg LP. "After a decade and a half as a loyal corporate soldier," he writes in Bloomberg by Bloomberg, an autohagiography, "I'd be my own general."

Bloomberg's business would extend the principle of his in-house automation project at Salomon. Top Wall Street brokerage houses were independently collecting data on bond pricing - a wasteful duplication of effort - and the data was still being manually manipulated. Bloomberg thought he could do the same for less, by building a system whose cost would be divided over many users. More important still, he envisioned that as an independent outside the broker-dealer business, his system could become a standard.

In October 1981, with three partners recruited from Salomon, he rented a small office in Manhattan, took his $10 million severance package, and boldly convinced Merrill Lynch that he could produce in six months a working terminal for no money up front. Right on time, Bloomberg and partner Duncan MacMillan, who worked at collecting data and identifying potential Bloomberg customers, piled into a taxi and headed to Merrill's offices, Mike carrying the terminal on his lap, MacMillan holding the keyboard. At Merrill, surrounded by traders, they hooked up the machine, and the screen came to life. The system worked as promised, delivering pricing information in real time. Merrill agreed to install 20 Bloomberg terminals. It also became a partner in Bloomberg LP, acquiring 30 percent of the company for $30 million. (In 1997, Bloomberg bought back a third of Merrill's stake for $200 million.)

By 1990, Bloomberg had leased 10,000 terminals. That same year, Dow Jones announced it would no longer provide its news feed to the terminal (a decision it later retracted), so Bloomberg unveiled a news service of his own, created and run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Matthew Winkler, who had become enamored of the man he once covered. The two shared a common vision: With the Cold War ending, financial news was destined to become a serious beat, no longer overshadowed by political news. Delivering that news in real time was the future.

Rejection from the news establishment was swift. Because Bloomberg Business News was delivered electronically, it wasn't considered a publication by the US Congress's Standing Committee of Correspondents. Although Dow Jones and UPI were delivered electronically as well, they had a print component: Their stories were reproduced daily in newspapers around the world. But Bloomberg Business News's "non-accredited" reporters were banned from certain official press briefings. Bloomberg turned the obstacle into a breakthrough. He decided to offer newspapers free terminals on the condition that they pick up Bloomberg Business News stories in their print editions. The first to take the offer, in 1991, was The New York Times. By 1995, Bloomberg's coverage was appearing in more newspapers than any other news service apart from the AP. Each published story propagated the credibility of the Bloomberg brand.

With this taste of the media's opinion-shaping power, Bloomberg began his expansion into radio and television. In 1992, he bought WNEW-AM in New York City for $13.5 million, getting a 50,000-watt transmitter in the capital of finance. (Bloomberg's WBBR is now one of the lowest-rated stations in New York.) Bloomberg then expanded into television. He created a series of financial shows for public TV and bought time on cable TV systems to transmit Bloomberg Information Television. This was also electronically narrowcast, along with the radio programs, to a new generation of desktop terminals whose multimedia dazzle puts the Web to shame. Along the way, Bloomberg hired 700 wire reporters and more than 100 radio and TV reporters, as his sales continued to grow by 20 to 30 percent a year.

"If you can't take 'nice ass' jokes," says one female staffer, "you won't be able to handle working here."

The Bloomberg is superb. More than a simple product, it is an environment, a vast terrain of crisp, fast-moving data. No other competitor has anything like it. It is everything the Internet is not: well organized, fast, and filled with help screens and responsive customer service.

One quickly becomes addicted to the Bloomberg and its financial equivalent of the fabled Library of Alexandria. While reporting this story, I would start the day Bloomberging with my coffee. The command WEI - world equity indices - brought up minute-by-minute moves of the Nikkei and London's "Footsie." Bond market activity was summarized by PX1, dollar moves with FXC. All morning economic news was delivered with ECO. Top news stories appeared by entering TOP.

Among the young Wall Street traders who spend every day in front of a Bloomberg, these terminals are a way of life.

Chad Sullivan, a 29-year-old bond trader with Capital Management Associates in New York, calls his Bloomberg the "Rolls-Royce" of terminals. With a Bloomberg on his desk, Sullivan manages $400 million in fixed-income securities, trading anywhere from $10 million to $20 million a day. "The Bloomberg is fantastic," he says. "I use it all day long. I have messages from London and Europe coming in the morning, as brokers feed me information. And they have great customer service. It's like one-stop shopping." When asked how he'd feel if someone took his Bloomberg away, Sullivan says, "Forget it. Taking out the Bloomberg would be a nightmare."

Central to the quality of the product has been a corporate culture that simply won't take no for an answer - an extension of its founder and his experience at Salomon. Fear and greed are the two emotions animating Wall Street: fear that the guy next to you might know something you don't; greed in that enough is never enough. In such an environment, paranoia is an asset, complacency a fatal liability, and survival of the fittest the sure outcome.

In one of the cultural contradictions that have brought Bloomberg's mini-empire to a turning point, people are expected to stay at the company forever, and any employee who quits (except for "family reasons") is not welcome back. Anyone who dares go work for a competitor is, in Mike's words, a traitor. "We all heartily and cordially really do hope," he writes in his book, "they fail."

After reading that passage aloud to Michael Bloomberg, I am given an explanation of "the Bloomberg Way."

"What's important is not the person that left," he tells me. "What's important is that I take care of the person who stayed." We are sitting in the small glassed-in conference room behind his desk that serves as his private meeting space. The walls are covered with framed newspaper and magazine articles, all hailing the man. "Upstart Aims to Seize Control of Information on Global Bond Mart," crows a front-page headline from The Wall Street Journal. On a bookcase sits a row of awards, from organizations like the Rainbow Coalition and the Boy Scouts of America; Bloomberg, who donated $100 million to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins, and who now chairs its board, has become one of the nation's better-known philanthropists. Next to the citations are replicas of F-15 and F-18 fighter jets he has piloted.

"If you work here, and you leave, and we sell fewer terminals in the company, you've hurt everybody," Mike continues. "It's very direct, plain and simple." How would he react if an employee told him he'd been offered triple the salary at another company and asked Bloomberg to match it? Mike gets angry. "The one way to guarantee that your salary is not going up for a while is to say that to me. That's just being a whore, and it's only a question of price. If that's what you are interested in, then leave."

Money, of course, is one of progress's greatest motivators. Yet Mike simply will not acknowledge that his iron-fisted definition of "loyalty" is a one-way street. Former and current Bloomberg employees alike point out that the company risks losing - and has lost - many of its best and brightest. "In a public company," one Bloomberg staffer explains, "you have to attract top talent because you have to delegate; long-term success comes from the company being bigger than any one person. At Bloomberg, it's different. There's a glass ceiling, and that's Mike. Anyone who challenges that has to leave."

Kourosh Karimkhany, a former Bloomberg reporter who now works for Wired News (a division of Wired Digital, no longer affiliated with Wired magazine), describes the Bloomberg environment as "an intellectual concentration camp," explaining that while people are rarely fired, they are forced out in covert ways. "Management humiliates them by dropping their salary down to $19,000 and tossing them in the mail room."

The culture can be especially tough on women. Off-color humor is commonplace. "If you can't take 'nice ass' jokes and learn to turn them right back, you won't be able to handle working here," one female staffer says. The attitude comes from the top, she says, describing Mike as a man whose "dealings with women come out of the 1950s." Bloomberg, who has two daughters, divorced his British-born wife in 1993. He later told London's Guardian newspaper that chasing women is one of his hobbies: "I'm a single, straight billionaire in Manhattan. What do you think? It's a wet dream."

"He likes beautiful women," the female staffer says, "and he sees no reason to censor himself."

The atmosphere has contributed to several sexual harassment lawsuits against Bloomberg LP. In one, a former terminal salesperson claims Mike, upon hearing she was pregnant, told her, "Kill it!" In another, a former technician in the service department claims Bloomberg made comments about her body and sexual appeal. When she complained to a manager, he allegedly told her that she should feel complimented by Mike's attention.

Mike attributes the lawsuits to "malcontents," and says: "In 18 years of business, we have had virtually no sexual harassment problems. We have three minor cases in court, and we are fighting every one because we did nothing wrong."

"Fundamentally, if you look around, these people seem to be having a good time doing what they want," he adds. "They work hard. They like it."

Despite the atmospheric tensions, employees do seem to stick with the company - locked in, perhaps, by Bloomberg's "certificates," a kind of stock in the gross income of the firm. Every two years, on the anniversary of their hire date, Bloomberg's workers receive cash bonuses based on the number of certificates their manager awards them. The certificates' value is proportionate to the number of new subscriptions the company has sold. It's not uncommon for these bonuses to account for 50 percent or more of a senior employee's income. Workers thus have an incentive to stay, at least until their certificate award date, as early departure forfeits the "certs."

The system is unifying, and because the certs are not based on net corporate income, staffers need not worry that, say, the expensive tropical fish in every office or Mike's pet projects will affect their bottom line. The expense of running the television and radio business, which a former top-level Bloomberg executive estimates loses $40 to $60 million a year, and the cost of running a book publishing division and three magazines, only one of which is profitable, are not factors in deciding bonuses. "There is an incentive not to take flight," says Jeff Cohen, a sales manager in the New York office. "I am paid based on terminal sales, and the fish tanks and the sculptures don't take away from that."

While it's a smart solution to running a large private company, its flaws are also obvious. No one other than Mike and three others owns equity in the company. If new sales fall, so does staffers' income; there's no long-term inducement to keep them with the company. The system also makes Mike accountable to no one - he owns nearly 80 percent of Bloomberg LP. He can spend what he likes, and live as he desires; although his own official salary is the same $19,000 a year that his lowest-paid worker makes, his bonus - which he refuses to disclose - and his holdings have given him a reported net worth of $2 billion.

Bloomberg has even ensured that his wishes will be followed after his death, having written into his will that his handpicked CEO will steer the company through a six-month transition. No one, other than Mike and his lawyer, knows who the successor is - not even the successor. "My estate is directed to sell the company within two years," Mike explains. "After six months, my board of directors can do whatever they want with my CEO. I do not want any hassles, I do not want any arguments, I do not want any study period. They've got this person for six months, period. During those six months they can bury me."

Slingshot by slingshot, the little Internet Davids are beginning to dent the Bloomberg Goliath.

Bloomberg makes no apologies for his management style. "Guess what?" one friend says. "It's his candy store." But his total control has also created a dangerous situation as the company maneuvers toward its future. "Mike is so tied into that culture of Bloomberg-or-nothing," says a recently departed Bloomberg executive. "It's insular. Like Microsoft, Bloomberg is a victim of its culture. It will win or lose on its culture."

Every culture needs heroes and villains. If Mike is Bloomberg LP's hero, then from the start the dark stars have been Reuters and Dow Jones.

Dow Jones was eventually defeated, retreating after its disastrous acquisition of Telerate, a real-time data provider. In 1998, only eight years after completing the purchase, Dow sold the company for less than one-third its $1.6 billion purchase price. British-based Reuters has continued to struggle to capture the ground it lost to the arriviste from New York. In 1993, Reuters fought to overcome its deficiencies with "Project Armstrong" - internally nicknamed the Bloomberg killer - which was to bring in vast amounts of historical data and tie it in with sophisticated analytics. Estimated by the company to have cost more than $100 million, the result was Reuters 3000, released in 1996 to a disappointing start, with only 38,000 terminals installed to date. Worse, Reuters became embroiled in a nasty criminal investigation when Bloomberg charged that Reuters' contractors were attempting to replicate Bloomberg's analytic tools, which have become the de facto industry standard. The investigation by the US Attorney's office in New York is pending.

But with $4.8 billion in revenues, Reuters, the largest financial information provider in the world, is far from vanquished. Reuters' new North American president, Tom Glocer, remains confident that the breadth of his company's offerings will ultimately prove more than competitive with Bloomberg's single product. "The one-size-fits-all solution," he says, referring to Bloomberg, "actually fits no one."

Bloomberg's believers might dismiss that contention - but it's the same conclusion reached by his new Internet-based competitors, who don't care about Bloomberg's brand recognition, or Reuters'. They are competing on price and value, much as compact cars do. To them, Bloomberg's terminal is as much a liability as an asset. And slingshot by slingshot, these little Davids are beginning to dent the Bloomberg Goliath.

Consider InSite, an Internet-based financial information system that costs $175 to $495 a month. Launched in June 1998, InSite has about 600 users. Offering a stripped-down combination of real-time bond and stock data, historical informa-tion, and analytic tools, it's trying to attack Bloomberg where he is weakest: at the low end of his market, the small retail brokers and money managers. Where Bloomberg has more than 1,000 analytic screens for bonds alone, InSite has 100 total. Although InSite lacks Bloomberg's depth of information, Steve Miller, the company's 39-year-old national sales manager, drives right through this liability. "If money is no object, you want a Bloomberg," he concedes. "Instead, we just let clients make a comparison between the two on their own."

The soft sell appears to be working. "We went to Boston to see a client with 12 Bloombergs," Miller says. "Two years ago they were highfliers running a hedge fund, but now as the market squeezes their profits they're looking for a cheaper alternative. They decided to take three InSite subscriptions and replace three Bloombergs. If they like it, they will take eight of ours and keep three or four Bloombergs. That will save them about $75,000 a year."

InSite is not marketed to trading desks. The Internet is still generally considered too unreliable by professionals who make money on second-to-second spreads between securities. And the content Bloomberg has amassed over 18 years has a density that would take thousands of hours to create from scratch and cost hundreds of millions to replicate and maintain. Nonetheless, InSite's threat to Bloomberg is very real.

"We had two Bloombergs," says Travis Pruit, an investment analyst with Copper Mountain Trust in Oregon, when asked why he didn't renew one of his Bloomberg subscriptions. "Without InSite, we would have kept both of them, but now we are going down to one Bloomberg." He recognizes InSite's shortcomings; it lacks Bloomberg's depth of bond analytics, but, he explains, "it does not make a difference, because I do not use them on both Bloombergs anyway."

It is precisely that sentiment that Bloomberg should dread: the perception that, because one does not use all the features of a Bloomberg, one does not need a one-price, all-you-can-eat buffet. And that's exactly what is starting to happen among the outer circle of Bloomberg users, financial professionals who do not trade by the second, but rather manage investments.

Mike shrugs off this competition. "Is there any evidence we are losing business to people like InSite? No. Keep in mind we have 100,000 terminals out there. Would we sell more Bloombergs at $700? Marginally more. Look," he adds, "I can give you a whole list of companies for every niche with someone who thinks they are better than us. So there's a better product for guys with upside-down collar-spreads. So?"

Yet Bloomberg concedes that since July, when the bull market was widely declared dead before its Lazarus-like resurrection, terminal installation growth slowed from 30 percent to 20 percent over the previous year, an indication that market performance and Bloomberg's performance are linked.

The company's vulnerability is actually visible on the terminal's keyboard: a row of 11 yellow buttons. With names like Equity, Muni, Cmdty, Crncy, and Govt, these buttons are gateways to a mine of information about different species of the genus "money." For the competition, each button is a specialty market. It's common sense to wonder if acquiring the equivalent of a few buttons, rather than all 11, is more cost-effective than a full Bloomberg.

Mark Minichiello, a financial analyst with Spinoff Advisors, a Chicago-based investment firm, came to that conclusion when he tried Quote.com's highest-end product, QCharts, which provides real-time stock quotes, unlimited customizable charting options, news from S&P MarketScope, and market reports from Vickers and First Call. At $130 a month, the service is delivered over the Internet through a Windows-based browser. Minichiello was satisfied enough to cancel his $1,600-a-month Reuters 3000 subscriptions. He's now wondering if his Bloomberg is worth the price.

Quote.com and other renegades are absolutely sure they can overturn Bloomberg, as assuredly as Bloomberg upset Reuters a decade ago. "We think we can dominate the individual trader market and go up the food chain to serve the institutional community," says Mark Imperiale, president and COO of Data Broadcasting Corporation, which produces InSite and two other products, Signal Online and StockEdge Online, and also resells real-time data to third parties. "Our analysis is that Bloomberg will have a very hard time coming downstream into our pond. They have too much to lose. We have more to gain."

Although Mike makes a good show of ignoring the new competition, in truth he's already risen to their threat. "Our profit margins are stable, and our volume is increasing," Bloomberg says. "Therefore we have to give the customer even more."

But his most significant response to the competition is to embrace the Internet - or parts of it, at least.

Through the early '90s, Bloomberg insisted that he had no intention of moving his system away from its proprietary platform of Bloomberg hardware and communications networks. Then in late 1995 he surprised everyone by announcing the launch of the "Open Bloomberg," a version of the Bloomberg that runs on customers' own PCs. The Open Bloomberg is IP compatible, but is designed to use a T1 or faster connection. It's linked to a router in the client's office, which connects directly to the Bloomberg mainframe farm in lower Manhattan. He has also introduced the Bloomberg Traveler, a portable version of his service that runs over the Net, using a dialup connection.

But here's the kicker: Bloomberg has said that, as of January 1, the classic Bloomberg box will no longer be sold, and beginning in September, the company will no longer support the old terminals. Everyone will have to migrate to the open, PC-based Bloomberg - though they will receive virtually the same service as before and pay the same price. (They can preserve the feel of the classic keyboard via stickers, an overlay, an onscreen e-keyboard, or an actual keyboard from Bloomberg that includes the 11 yellow keys.) With little fanfare, the company has shifted 60 percent of its customers to the Open Bloomberg already. Not incidentally, moving to an open platform will save the company money, since the cost of supporting each PC will fall upon clients.

The Open Bloomberg signals Mike's recognition that the era of closed systems is ending - it was inevitable that his customers would demand a version of the Bloomberg that can run on Windows. But old habits die hard. Internally, both the company and the man have trouble thinking beyond the box: New sales, Open Bloomberg or classic, are still referred to as "terminals."

Acutely aware of technology's rapid pace of change, Mike knows that the leaders of one era are usually followers in the next. "IBM was a leader in mainframes in the 1950s," he says. "Then Digital became the leader of the minicomputer revolution in the 1960s. The PC era launched new names - Dell and Compaq, Microsoft. In each case the leader of one phase failed to dominate the next phase. Now," he says, holding his PalmPilot, "we're entering the era of simpler devices made by different companies."

Likewise, Mike is anticipating a day when the Internet will be fast enough to serve as the communications backbone for his service. Already, he's pushing some far-flung clients to the Internet. "In Cyprus, we closed one node. It cost $100,000 to put the line out there, and we had one guy using the system." Customers in Malta, Gibraltar, Andorra, Bulgaria, and China (except Beijing) have been forced onto the Net, as well. "If I could get all our customers to come to us over the Internet," he told Wired last year, "we would save $70 million a year overnight." It's a move that leaves Bloomberg with more options, if he decides one day to tier his service.

Never happen? Despite Mike's contention that the Internet is not a threat, a few miles from his Princeton data-collection center, in what's known as the analytics building, his company is quietly spending $30 million to construct another IP-compatible hub for his network, to parallel the farm of 300 mainframes in lower Manhattan. "We call this 'Tera World,'" Bob Indelicato, a Bloomberg network engineer, says of the new, 130,000-square-foot facility, with its bank of Sun and Data General servers, a rack of high-speed Sonnet routers, and the 10 "domains," each with 100 megabits of bandwidth.

But the company's exploration of new distribution mechanisms does not end with its belated embrace of the Web. Sitting just outside a bunker of terminals tracking user activity at 499 Park Avenue, Tom Secunda, Bloomberg's head of technology development, recalls for me how in early 1998 Mike appeared holding a Windows CE device by Hewlett-Packard with a tiny keyboard and a color screen. "Mike asked me how long it would take to get the Bloomberg on it," says Secunda, who wrote the system for the first terminal in 1982. "I told him three weeks."

A few moments later, a programmer brings to Secunda an HP 620LX Palmtop, attached to a CDPD Motorola modem. In an instant, the tiny color screen fills with a fully functional Bloomberg - proof of concept, if customers want it, that Bloomberg can deliver the system this way. "It's a marketing question," Secunda says, "not a technology question. It's up to Mike to decide."

What will Mike decide? "I never had a game plan," Bloomberg says, looking back at his career. "Everyone is a lot smarter than me, I guess." It's a joke. He pauses for a moment, and the joke ends. "We have a million people trying to put us out of business," he says. "I can't worry about them."