[A_D_E_P_T]

Palantir isn't a good name. It's a disastrously bad one, if you ask me. It's a constant scandal as every five minutes somebody gets the bright idea that "ackshually the Palantir were a tool for evil made by a demon!!"

They're never able to live it down. It always comes up. And it makes them seem, in a way, careless.

[gzread]

It's a great name if your target customer base is people who want to be evil by surveilling everything. Behold my next company, "Eye of Sauron LLC"

[munk-a]

Nah - that customer base would much rather a mean-nothing name like "Salesforce". The real evil people don't revel so much in their evilness they're much more in the "ends justify the means" camp where they can try and hide their evilness from their conscience. Nobody wants to wear a pin saying "I am, in fact, a terrible person that the world would be better without."

[gzread]

Hmm, that's also true. Maybe it's about different generations of evil, or old and new evil, where new evil wants to adopt all the flashy symbols of evil while old evil understands it's best to keep a low profile

[Cpoll]

Ackshually the Palantir were made by the Elves of Valinor, and weren't made as a tool for evil.

In fact, there's a very interesting theme there: The Palantir are only as useful as their users are wise. The power to see is disastrous if you don't know where to look and how to interpret what you see.

If they named it with that in mind, I'd say it's a very thoughtful name, and a prescient caution. But I doubt it.

[Steltek]

It was a powerful tool made for good but trivially corrupted to serve evil. It's a perfect description of the real world thing, IMO.

[XorNot]

You're talking about it. Right now along with a solid dozen other people as the only comments on this thread.

People barely understand what the company does, but boy do they want to tell you all about the name.

It's marketing gold. Because rather then "who was that? Some firm named something corp" instead you're spending 5 minutes reinforcing how bad the name is..just building a ton of word association games for a name derived from a well known fiction work and really building up the message that the company is named Palantir and they sell products to the government.