You Can't Copy Palantir (ethanding.substack.com)

> i wrote this essay bc i want to move the discourse away from the low signal bullshit around ”what is or isn’t an FDE”, and towards what is palantir?

> Palantir is a vertically integrated outcome based software solution provider

Nailed it AFAICT.

From TFA, https://ethanding.com/foundry-viz/ is indeed a neat visualization of the public Palantir docs.

Palantir is basically a consulting shop with fancy marketing designed to shift perception so it doesn’t get valued at the low multiples that being a consulting business normally entails.

Only somewhat related, but I find it disconcerting to just have screenshots of LLM output in the middle of an essay, especially without alt-text. Not a good reading experience imo.

[dead]

What Palantir does is foreign to our modern way of doing tech business, but it is not very different from how business was done in the 60s and 70s.

Things like IBM's SAGE were also deeply vertically integrated, as well as one of its more notable civilian spin-offs, SABRE.