On the 16th floor of a central Tokyo office tower, exact rows of workers sit behind the white lines of Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh desktop machines. This isn't a firm, making a graphic design or a publishing house. Usually, among the few businesses to favor Macs over PCs that run Microsoft Corp.'s ubiquitous Windows operating system. This is the main office of Aozora Bank, which is the one of three Japanese lenders snapped up by foreign investors after collapsing, happening in the late 1990s. At present, owned mainly by U.S. buyout fund Cerberus, Aozora is sprucing up ahead of a widely expected share listing. Also, it has asked Apple to outfit 2,500 workstations at its lead office, data center and 17 branches. The order has made Aozora the iPod-maker's largest financial industry client all over the world. ‘The question for us was how to simplify the environment and bring it forward 15 years in one jump,’ told Aozora's chief technology officer and a former tech executive at Citibank, Bill Chute.

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