blog We’d laugh about this, but really we’d prefer to cry instead. The CommonWealth Bank of Australia is currently deploying thousands of MacBooks (Airs and Pros) to staff at its flagship new headquarters in Sydney’s Darling Park complex … but with Windows XP configured to boot by default. ZDNet.com.au reports:

“Each staff member in the Commonwealth Bank’s new precinct is issued a fully specced out 11-inch MacBook Air running Windows XP, as well as a Jabra DECT headset.”

And iTNews has more detail:

“A majority of Commonwealth Bank Place staff were issued with 11-inch MacBook Air laptops, configured by integrator HP to boot directly into the bank’s Windows XP standard operating environment.”

The rollout is doubly ironic given that it was only in June this year that CommBank chief information officer Michael Harte was praising the Apple interface. At the time, this is what Harte told the Financial Review about the issue:

“New entrants … coming into the workplace and they expect the convenience that they get at home on their desktop at work,” Harte says in the interview. “If they’ve become au fait with and love the convenience and richness of an Apple interface, and then have to go back to some clumsy PC that’s being run by some enterprise service group, they get frustrated.”

When I was at ZDNet.com.au a few years back, we asked CommBank whether it was interested in deploying Windows 7; however the bank said that although it had reviewed the beta of Windows 7, it had no plans to deploy it at that stage. Looks like Win7 is still on the backburner for the bank.