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Sounds great - but what is fundamentally different from the hit-and-run on-site engineering that companies like Accenture have been doing for decades?

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The core difference I've seen is that FDEs sell a product whereas consultants sell billable hours.

The Big 4 incentive is to stay as long as possible, build custom code that only they can maintain, upcharge on maintenance while outsourcing it to developing countries.

FDEs sell a product (Foundry, Gotham, GPT, Claude, Databricks). They deploy their platform to solve your problem, then move on. The incentive is to get it working fast, not to embed themselves.

Also, the talent bar is drastically different. Palantir/OpenAI hire top 1% engineers. Accenture... doesn't.

I am fairly certain that Palantir, like many companies before it, will evolve from a sort-of product company into more of a consulting company. It's just what happens when you sell to governments. They won't be able to keep those top 1% engineers.

On talent: Accenture and its predecessors used to have really, really smart people.

I guess I'm just being contrarian and saying that all of this has happened before.

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