Like how Tableau is a great UI for grammar of graphics, Palantir is a great UI for ontological expert systems. Technically you could do everything without it but organizations and especially government typically don’t cultivate that level of expertise in their staff.

In my view expert systems typically failed because the organizations would degrade bureaucratically faster than any expert system could accommodate. With AI there isn’t a pre-requisite need for organizational expertise so the tooling will still work in largely dysfunctional orgs which is a property that did not previously exist. With the help of AI people who don’t understand ontologies can still successfully build one.

Separately it is my opinion that Palantir is a CIA cut-out for the Peter Thiel faction. So paying Palantir is like paying tribute to that particular faction. Similar to how other large military purchases are less about the military hardware and more of a client state subscription to ‘align interests’ such that the US is more likely to act in the donor countries interest.

Plenty of companies don't "need to exist". A company exists because someone decided to start it (usually to make some money) and lasts until someone decides to end it (usually when it stops making money).

If you're asking why Palantir (and Salesforce, Jira, etc) continue to make money despite not having any novel or complex technologies, my experience has been that these are not prerequisites for solving the vast majority of business problems. Usually network effects, customer relationships, brand identity, user interface, inertia, etc are all more important than the technology.

It is not always easy for a technologist to admit, but companies whose ongoing success is primarily due to some sort of (non-UX) technological superiority are the exception rather than the rule.

Sometime back, someone described in a way that was interesting to read. So, I bookmarked it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44896367

Reproducing it verbatim;

“Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.

For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.”

There is a fairly recent demo of Maven Smart System, which is the military product offering on top of Gotham (their government product)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrtDgoqWmgM

The commercial product, Foundry, is very well documented and an extensive Data Platform that allows to build data pipelines (similar to Databricks) and build low code / no code applications on top. If you master it, its incredibly powerful but complex

> Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD

It's not rocket science. Those particular database schemas, together with those particular CRUD layers, do something useful, and neither building nor maintaining those applications is part of the core business for most companies, so buying prebuilt from somebody else, and letting them maintain it for you, makes perfect business sense.

Companies need databases lol.

I don't know how you think a b2b company could run sales without a CRM like Salesforce.

To give your question a generous interpretation, Salesforce is more valuable than Apptio or your home grown CRM because it already has all the features any sales org needs, and all the fragmented sales and marketing tooling are already integrated with it.

And Sales is a very expensive and also high ROI activity. You don't want your sales team hung up trying to figure out how to get the random CRM to do something. You're not looking to cut costs in this area, you're looking to enhance the overall productivity of the org. Sales tooling overall is very expensive for this reason, any marginal edge is worth a lot.

It's also worth noting that a big value of things like Salesforce is that it lets management check up on what people are doing, because as much as HN doesn't like to admit it, people are often not very careful or diligent, and you need to perform supervision on the vast majority of people to improve their performance.

Jira is similar, in that eng is very expensive, and its probably better than what these companies were doing beforehand, even if it is suboptimal.

Because it's hard for the government[1] to build computer systems.

Government salaries are pretty low compared to dev salaries. If the government wants to hire devs and pay them as much as private industry does, they'd have to pay them much more than what their superriors (and their superriors' superriors) make, which would destroy workplace morale. They could raise everyone's salaries, but that's deeply unpopular, as a large part of the population view all high-level government functionaries as crooks by definition.

The way you get around that is by using contractors. Contractors let you hide the cost of software development. Instead of paying $150k to a software developer (which is probably more than the director makes), you pay $10m to a company, not unusual when you also hire companies to build you planes and bridges. How that company allocates that 10m and how much they pay their engineers is no longer your concern, and no longer an embarrassment to your hierarchy and salaries.

However, writing contracts for software is hard, for the same reason waterfall is hard. You just don't really know what the requirements are before the project starts, and in a traditional RFP process, you can't accurately model what requirements are the costliest and should perhaps be reconsidered. This means contracted government projects usually turn into an exercise in checkbox-checking and terrible, unusable UIs which technically fulfill the acceptance criteria, and therefore have to be accepted.

Palantir has somehow managed to actually collaborate with the government, sending forward-deployed engineers to figure out what their actual needs are, and then writing software which fulfills exactly those needs, bringing techniques which modern tech companies have learned along the way. I don't actually know how they managed to circumvent the RFP process well enough to do this.

[1] "The government" here can apply to any government you like, not necessarily the US government.

Palantir’s product is light years ahead of anything any government IT project has ever, and in my opinion can ever, deliver. They’re not even in the same league.

Somebody needs to wrap up open source AI/ML and sell it to governments / defense, and do the integration... (e.g. open source Python face recognition libraries, openCV, YOLO object detection, etc. and more recently LLMs.)

It's 100% laziness on the side of procurement, aided by some good marketing and a complete lack of guardrails. Exactly the same mindset that has led to every European government now being tied to US big tech.

Why does Palantir specifically need to exist? To funnel those juicy government budgets into shareholders' pockets.

Why does anyone bother to use them? Because they have convincing marketing (which may or may not include buttering government palms with, um, "incentives" ...)

Occam's razor: It's a big pile of "list of things being handled by an outside entity so I neither have to think about it, nor hire for them."

They're just a systems integrator with extra marketing full of empty promises. Think IBM, but less shit.

They have magic consultant power mode.

In government you have to deliver, most of the time the mode of delivery is boring, small, conservative, and disjointed from other government groups because large efforts of work attract big budgets, oversight and doubt.

Consultants are magic, because they come with no baggage and promise the world. They take you hostage with sunk cost fallacy and then after years they deliver something.

At the end you're so tired you think that what they did was beyond your government agency and the cycle continues.

Their reason for existing is: they provide a source for consultants willing to work with cops and surveillance agencies.

The software exists because it's now convenient and easier to build their own than depend on a contractor.