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Comment by fourthark | Hacker News Reader

It’s promoted as a complete system, but you end up paying them to build out the system to do whatever you wanted to do.

IBM, Oracle, Panatir....in a lot of cases these are pro services companies that custom build whatever is needed. LOTS of money in enterprise application development.

Oracle is a expensive and "popular" database, IBM does many things ( eg. Quantum computers, ... )

Palantir is a consultancy body shop with a dashboard product and a probably good pipeline for merging data. ( Reference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646587 )

Pure consultancy is rated much lower ( eg. Thoughtworks if you want a reference)

Consultancy + adaptable software is a decent business model. Unfortunately "adaptable software" for {insert industry} is a really hard target to architect right.

Especially when the majority of your tech headcount bills by the hour and gets paid to tell the customer "Yes."

I didn't say it isn't a decent business model.

In the context of pltr, I'm saying it's not similar as Oracle/ibm and comparison is futile.

That's how it is for just about any non-trivial business system. They're sold as complete systems, but there's still customization required for those systems to actually fit the business - and it's through offering consulting for those customizations that enterprise software vendors make the big bucks.

Right, AI is just custom software, with people in the back to deal with edge cases?

It's IF statements all the way down, baby.

IF (intelligence.getAnswer("What is the meaning of life?")) {...}

Yeah, that is patently untrue.

How so?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com