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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

palantir might be "Google for Intelligence", but judging by previous discussions on HN it looks like it's actually "Accenture for Intelligence".

I.e. they don't seem to have scary innovative technology as much as a horde of people doing integration work (and some good reusable tools)

See discussions from 1 year ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646587

And 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8872054

Google for Intelligence is what they have been selling, but it's unclear they have actually delivered.

View on HN

Palantir might not be "Google for Intelligence", but there is some unfavorable bias on HN against them, so the "Accenture for Intelligence" nickname might stem from wanting to be condescending.

Accenture is much more accurate than Google.

Palantir and Accenture are consulting company. They make money by reselling meat by the hours, as we say in business. They don't profit from what is created at the client. They profit more by buying cheaper meat (graduates) and reselling with higher margin to clients.

Google is a software company. It makes money on the software service they provide. They get the returns for everything you do. They get more money by you making "better" software infrastructure and services.

> They don't profit from what is created at the client

Palantir does indirectly profit from what's created at the client, by reselling the code created at one client to other clients later.

Software companies benefit from code re-use and quality by reselling the same software to every client, then getting all the returns.

Consulting companies don't. The reason they are called in the first place is to make highly customized software.

Most consulting companies will pretend to re-use things across clients. In practise however, it cannot be achieved because it's going against their business model (yet they'll still pretend they do).

Consulting companies very often do not own the software they build at a clients, and so can't really reuse it. That's not what Palantir does.

I'm not sure what you think the business model is that would go against code reuse across sites. If you can afford to negotiate for ownership of what you build at a client site, why wouldn't you reuse things that are common?

Like, the reuse thing isn't binary. There's a whole spectrum between 'give everyone exactly the same thing', and 'give ever y single client something built for them from scratch'. And if you can build something from scratch at one client site, take half of that to another client, take 3/4 of that to yet another, and eventually end up only having to build 2-3% of the thing at every place, that's building a product while already getting paid for it.

>>> I'm not sure what you think the business model is that would go against code reuse across sites. If you can afford to negotiate for ownership of what you build at a client site, why wouldn't you reuse things that are common?

Because there isn't much that is common. You're called to craft customised software, with special customization for the client needs and tight integration with the client systems.

Anyway, none of this matters. At the end of the day. A consulting shop doesn't bill software, it bills the hours*men.

Whatever spectrum you think you can achieve, your actual business model always push back to its extreme side.

I've worked at consulting shops trying to bill software as software. I've never seen it goes very well.

Palantir is more consultingish-convert-to-subscription/product model where possible... they make money anyway they can and keep looking to build new business opportunities with consultingish svcs.

In general, strict consultancies are inherently unscalable and expensive, whereas SaaS has a unit cost of nearly $0. The benefits of consultingish, unscalable behaviors are known, in order to get to, and create new, scalable products.

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Palantir runs a shit-ton of RHEL boxes for clients include a dozen TLA (three-letter agencies). I know because they tried to hire me to do just that.

I'm asking because I don't know, does Accenture typically create the software they sell? Off topic, does TCS/Infosys typically make the thing they sell?

Accenture does do custom software.

Google's bet is that technology will replace humans. Palantir's bet is that technology works best when combined with human intuition. So yes, they do horde a lot of people but the idea is to bet on the intersection between man and machine rather than trying to replace one with the other!

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