Ah yes, the good old candyman tactic: the first one’s free to rope you in.
Homes for Ukraine was set up in in March 2022, less than a month after Russia’s full scale invasion.
Through a website, backed by an IT system, those who had a rent-free space in their home or a separate residence could to offer it to refugees.
In order to set this up quickly, then-Conservative government ministers accepted an offer from Palantir to build a system to administrate the scheme, based on its Foundry platform, for free for six months.
In a 2023 blog post, Palantir described the challenge of combining data from multiple government systems containing tens of thousands of visa applications and hundreds of thousands of accommodation offers.
Subsequent 12-month contracts were awarded - one worth £4.5m and another £5.5m, according to a National Audit Office report.
The report notes the Government’s chief commercial officer informed Palantir of his concern about the firm’s practice of offering a zero- or nominal-cost initial offer to gain a commercial foothold.
I’m not dismissing the work it takes to help refuges, but it still seems to me using Palantir for that is shooting cannons at sparrows. I wonder if they had other motivations beyond good publicity and what for Mr Thiel must be pocket money.
They are trying a razor and razorblade model. Build out a system for free/cheap to get vendor lock-in and charge through the nose on maintenance while trying to keep out any competition.
Worse, there is likely value in getting access to that data and they likely built the system to make it hard to audit access on their end.
Ah yes, the good old candyman tactic: the first one’s free to rope you in.
I’m not dismissing the work it takes to help refuges, but it still seems to me using Palantir for that is shooting cannons at sparrows. I wonder if they had other motivations beyond good publicity and what for Mr Thiel must be pocket money.
They are trying a razor and razorblade model. Build out a system for free/cheap to get vendor lock-in and charge through the nose on maintenance while trying to keep out any competition.
Worse, there is likely value in getting access to that data and they likely built the system to make it hard to audit access on their end.