Fairly ignorant of what Palintir actually does, but my layman's understanding is that it should be a thing easy enough to replicate. Why are they uniquely positioned as they appear to be?

Palantirs are inherently evil, and they deceive those who use them. Sauron was deceived into thinking Pippin had the ring, and this led to his demise. Denethor saw what he thought was Sauron's army, and was driven to suicide.

Data ingestion and visualization. They ingest data from a variety of different sources and make it easier to correlate data that might previously have been separate. As in, workflows that might have involved analyzing one data set, writing stuff in Excel, and then looking at a different data set, and cross referencing that excel spreadsheet manually can be done much more easily in Palantir's products

Here's an example of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8bwhAW2Mg

It's hard to describe because each customer usually has some set of customization to their workflow. One palantir customer probably uses the tool in a way unrecognizable to the next customer.

The other, perhaps more significant, asset Palantir has is a team that's gotten really good at interfacing with legacy systems and ingesting data into a more modern one.

One thing to note is, Palantir doesn't collect any data. People so often just assume that it does. The data collection is done by the government. Palantir just builds a fancy browser for data that the government already owns. So if people are angry about data being collected, go blame your government not Palantir.

The way I see it is the web was supposed to transform into the Semantic Web in 2000. What that means is you can give everything an identifier and create any type of relationship, turning the entire web into a database designed for a type of reasoning. On its own this is pretty benign, and I thought it would be a Good Thing because it would engage people past pages, links, and predetermined content. I imagined it becoming interesting for most people to craft meaningful connections. I also thought it would enable people to be more usefully and grounded-ly critical of big orgs, through projects like Sunlight Foundation and eventually Wikipedia (and now Wikidata, which uses the formal Semantic Web).

But the basic idea of "things" and relationships is easy to conceptualize, in fact those physical evidence boards with people and things connected by association have been around for a long time.

But the formal Semantic Web tech proved too complicated, so it's only really used in areas like science and to a limited degree for SEO. However, companies like Google and Facebook saw the value and built their own "knowledge graphs," and eventually companies like Palintir started selling services built on the ability to create knowledge graphs about anything. There are a few companies that do this on a smaller scale, but Palintir has really taken off, and given (and perhaps because of) the personality of the founders and its policing/military focus, and the fact that everyone is incidentally connected one way or another, it has become a very dangerous tool because it ironically does the opposite of what these tools should do on a large scale, enables big orgs to track individuals, starting perhaps legitimately with crooks and terrorists but now expanding into every field and citizen, meaning everyone can be tracked, predicted, and managed (barring good societal rules). If it isn't stopped, it gives absolute control to whoever is on top.

They make trump like you. The best way to get the US state on your side these days is to send money to Oracle, Palintir, or a bitcoin address.

So why hasn’t someone replicated them?

They’re over 20 years old at this point. That makes them a tech dinosaur.

Sophisticated systems plus powerful connections in government and industry plus so much money. That’s hard to unseat.