Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?

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diveandfight 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think one thing to keep in mind is that the bar had been subterranean. I've had to work on a few platforms that were either the incumbent Palantir was trying to displace or a competitor trying to beat Palantir. All were not great, but the non-Palantir products would be embarrassing to release to a general enterprise or consumer market.

My observation from the peanut gallery, is that Palantir has been successful because they created a tech-culture incentive system for engineers, whereas legacy contractors (Booz, Deloitte, Accenture, CACI, Boeing, etc.) treated engineers as cost center plus. I think it was literally as simple as: pay engineers Big Tech competitive salary, allow them to collaborate directly with clients to develop solutions, and actively remove Product Managers/Contract Managers from interfering -> megabucks.

To your point, I don't think this is an intrinsic or structural moat. To the extent someone can do these things better or faster than Palantir, I could easily see them beating Palantir in the future.

	▲	diveandfight 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think I missed a connecting piece here, since this is a non-government contract for Palantir. Since they've been able to do the above, I think they've developed a pretty good skillset at merging disparate data and surfacing it for analytics. Combine that with the fact that their government business is a money-printing machine, you basically end up with an analytics shop that has significant experience at scale and is extremely well capitalized. For a relatively non-tech savvy or uninformed customer, Palantir could look like a pretty attractive option.

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danavar 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

some of their value comes in as they're an outside party with carte-blanche to organize your data....do you have 10 internal teams that can't agree on a schema or organize themselves well due to political reasons? hire palantir

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partiallypro 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At least in the military aspect, I have heard nothing but great things about them from service member friends/family.

I personally find the panic over Palantir, Data Centers, etc to be largely mass hysteria vs anything else. It has become an omni-cause like Israel (I mean part of the backlash against Palantir is that the CEO is Jewish, just read any internet comment thread on the topic.)

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cowpig 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Their contracts give them a preposterous amount of control over their customers. All of the "Sovereignty" messaging is kind of ironic because it basically boils down to "don't trust them, trust us"

Besides that they're basically the most expensive, white-glove, enterprise-y version of what they do