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?
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.
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.
Besides that they're basically the most expensive, white-glove, enterprise-y version of what they do
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.)
Dont be disingenuous, you know damn well the backlash isn't because he is jewish. Its because of the business relationship with the Israeli government and how Palintirs tech has been used as a tool in Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people.
>just read any internet comment thread on the topic
You're the first comment in this thread or any ive seen, mentioning the CEOs religion.
>I have heard nothing but great things about them from service member friends/family
Really? And what is it that these friends and family members are saying great things about Palintir?
This reads like some grade A marketing bot bullshit