This isn’t about foreign banks (though some people would argue that ICICI is practically a foreign owned bank now), but it’s an interesting enough story to share anyway.
ICICI Bank is expanding so fast that its IT costs are ballooning. In a desperate cost cutting measure, the head office announced an open source initiative: from now on, all new PCs and laptops would use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office.
Which is nice, except that the Windows version of Open Office is pretty slow. Oh, it does everything that MS Office does, just a whole lot slower. Spreadsheets in particular are resource hogs. For anyone in the bank who has to work with huge amounts of data, this is a problem.
A friend tells me of this conversation he had with his boss.
Friend: I’ve finished the calculations. Here’s the spreadsheet.
Boss: Hmmm, do you think the calculations are okay?
Friend: Yeah, I think I’ve got everything right.
Boss: Fine, I’ll take your word for it. If I open it up here to check it’ll take too long.
Heh. Unintended consequences are funny things.
