The linked post mentioned "Dell Services". I am assuming this is a, uh, service company, not a commodity hardware design and sales company. The vast majority o

The linked post mentioned "Dell Services". I am assuming this is a, uh, service company, not a commodity hardware design and sales company. The vast majority of value, or at least the perceived value, provided by Accenture to its clients comes directly from Accenture employees by the very nature of the consulting business. They might sell you physical hardware, but the real reason you're hiring them is the expertise in knowing how to use it for your specific project, otherwise you'd just get it directly from Dell yourself. They don't, or at least aren't supposed to, design a product once and then sell it to millions of customers. On the other hand, once an iPod is designed (to be fair, that isn't trivial), it's handed off to a third party who no longer figures in the employee count and basically used to print money. Maximizing profit per employee is reasonable, though cross-industry comparisons can still be problematic. It's revenue per employee that's a little meaningless as mentioned by _delirium. edit: this post follows the value proposition of Accenture services as stated by Accenture itself. Let's not go into how accurate that is right now.