May 2015: Tall Poppy Syndrome is Alive and Well

Some know it as tall poppy syndrome, while others explain the phenomenon metaphorically as the tallest trees catching the most wind—the somewhat disturbing, yet universally prevalent, behavior where people take particular delight in a high-profile person or organization being brought down a peg or two. Sometimes it’s not necessarily a bad thing when the mighty fall—falling keeps their feet on the ground and adds a bit of humility to the mix. In short, we tend to love people a little bit more when they show their fallibility.

Such an incident happened in our industry fairly recently. As everyone connected to the capital markets pretty much knows by now, Bloomberg experienced an unprecedented outage on Friday April 17 leaving large numbers of its ubiquitous Bloomberg Professional terminals blank across several markets, making it impossible trade. The last time a similar incident occurred was back in 2006, when Reuters experienced a comparable event.

To their credit, the Bloomberg folks at this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards in New York held up their hands and took the resulting criticism on the chin, acknowledging that they weren’t proud of the news, but that the circumstances surrounding the outage were exceptional and that everything would be done to ensure that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again. Ironically, the fact that news of the outage spread so quickly, is an acknowledgement of not only the vital role Bloomberg plays in the orderly functioning of the global capital markets, but more significantly, it emphasizes the service levels and reliability the industry has come to expect from the New York-based provider.

So, was the outage disruptive? Yes. Was it unacceptable? Yes. Was it intentional? Of course not. Are heads going to roll as a result of the fiasco? Probably. But you can rest assured that, given the firm’s attention to detail and its reputation, it is turning over stones as I write to ensure that such incidents do not happen again. Sure there’s always a slim chance, but it’s unlikely we will experience an identical disruption, although outages are bound to occur. In fact, they may even become more common, given the levels of sophistication and increasing instances of cyber attacks on capital markets firms.

Understandably, there was much finger pointing and criticism leveled at Bloomberg in the wake of the April 17 outage, with some commentators arguing that the firm had become “too big to fail.” I would counter those assertions by encouraging Bloomberg clients to vote with their feet and take their business to another provider. Good luck with that.

So, was the outage disruptive? Yes. Was it unacceptable? Yes. Was it intentional? Of course not. Are heads going to roll as a result of the fiasco? Probably