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.

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.