Comment by digitalsin
4 years ago
I worked at a small company who bid on an RFP against Accenture back in 2000ish. We bid way lower than Accenture and we were already established at the state government agency with a great track record.
I remember while the proposal evaluation process was happening, Accenture sent their proposed PM to the town where the agency was based and he literally bought a house there to show Accenture's commitment to the agency. Of course he sold it after the project was awarded.
Accenture was awarded the contract, who then came to us and hired our company as a subcontractor to actually do most of the development work with the exception of the project management and two other devs. So the agency paid millions of dollars to get Accenture but in the end still got us essentially. Nice use of taxpayer dollars there.
On the plus side, since Accenture was so tight with Microsoft at the time, Microsoft got Accenture to agree to use .NET for that project which wasn't even publicly available yet..let alone complete. It would look good for Microsoft to show that a state agency had adopted .NET and they had planned to do a case study on the project. So we got to use .NET before many other developers. There was 0 documentation, so that was fun, but we got access to the actual MS devs working on the nuts and bolts of .NET. Fun times.
Accenture sucks.
Early .NET was basically Java, wasn't it? Java devs should have picked it up pretty easily.
It was very similar, at least based on what little I knew of Java. Most of the devs, including myself on that project were coming from classic ASP / COM background so it was a very new way to do things. The project was initially proposed to use the ASP/COM architecture and Accenture switched to .NET about a month into the project start (during the design phase). I don't know if that was planned or MS pressured them once they became aware of it. It was a high profile project at the time so I'm sure there were plenty of politics happening in the background that those of us on the dev side weren't aware of.
I read somewhere that it was based on Delphi because the same guy made both.