"I've also been told that your second language in school (which is taught in English, a neutral language) is determined by your race: Mandarin for Chinese, Malay for Malaysians, and Tamil (!) for Indians."
Remember though that Singapore is bilingual, so the "second language" will be the primary language spoken at home (although some Chinese may speak Hokkien or another dialect instead, and many families speak mainly English).
Roughly around 60% of Indians in Singapore are Tamil (mostly from Tamil Nadu, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka), so that could be one reason the government chose Tamil as the "second language" of Singaporean Indians.
A hell of a lot of business processes are built on esoteric (and localized, as in a script sitting on a computer in the office) Excel and Access functionality - the Western Australian mining industry being a prime example.
This whole "let's move everything to the cloud" movement seems primarily to be driven by people who don't have a lot of work to do on computers besides browse websites, email, and write blog posts. They may do a lot of other work, but their computer use is fairly limited to a few tasks.
Meanwhile, business users are only going to make the jump when the multi-billion dollar companies that employ them feel comfortable having confidential information stored on a server in some other random country (i.e. probably not in my lifetime).
That's the problem Google and the other "cloud" providers have to overcome before they can claim victory - not some minimal use case like this.
Remember though that Singapore is bilingual, so the "second language" will be the primary language spoken at home (although some Chinese may speak Hokkien or another dialect instead, and many families speak mainly English).
Roughly around 60% of Indians in Singapore are Tamil (mostly from Tamil Nadu, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka), so that could be one reason the government chose Tamil as the "second language" of Singaporean Indians.