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?
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.
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’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.
Their software is powerful and their FDEs make it valuable for customers. Every person in the billionaire class has high inside sales leverage.
Also it's take special kind of people to build right kind of slimy business structures to work with governments.
It's not just about corruption though because people who choose to work for governments have completely different set of motivations vs just making money. So working with them is just harder than working with business structures with simple goal to maximize profit.