The impression I get from their involvement at one company I know of is that it’s very much the latter. I was pretty surprised to see them behaving and performing about the same as any parasitic enterprise software vendor with an integration services arm. One wonders how different they really are, and if maybe they just have very good PR and marketing.
Chalk it up as yet another case of some famous one-would-suppose impressive entity, or strata of a company hierarchy, or whatever, turning out to be pretty average, or even below average. You’d think I’d stop being surprised by now.
I’ve heard you often get the A Team coming up with the plan and making the sale and then the B Team doing the actual implementation which surprise! doesn’t live up to the A Team hype. Not specific to Palantir.
My sense working at an adjacent company and having talked with folks there is that they are more successful with their government projects than their corporate ones.