Microsoft apologized Wednesday after a Polish version of the company’s ad had a black man’s head replaced with the head of a white man. The image alteration of the picture was making rounds on the forums last night and Microsoft pulled the picture today.
The edit of the Microsoft ad for its Polish division was crude, to say at least. The U.S. ad depicted three people at a conference table: an Asian man, a black man, and a white woman. When localizing the marketing image for Poland, Microsoft had the black man’s head clumsily replaced with that of a white man.
As pictured above, the photos are basically identical and the Microsoft ad left room for racial interpretation. However, in the picture, only the black man’s head was replaced — the hands noticeably a different color.
Many thought this was originally a joke, but a double check last night on both Microsoft’s U.S. and Polish sites confirmed otherwise. Microsoft apologized and pulled the image from the Polish site today, while “looking into the details of this situation,” the company told Cnet. The Polish Microsoft site now features the unaltered image.
A couple of other things are peculiar about Microsoft’s (even unedited) image. First of all, the laptop in front of the black man is an Apple MacBook (yes, another Apple product in a Microsoft ad with the logo covered) and the computer monitor in front of the woman is not plugged into anything, even though the keyboard is.
thats racist
Man, you can’t please anyone these days. All this work being done NOT to piss off a particular special interest group.
What is this world coming to.
There’s something subliminally untrustworthy about a company whose name breaks down into “Micro” and “soft”!
Say hello to the wireless monitor!
Hmmm. Sometimes the gimmicks make companies mean….
Oddly, the original picture looks like the guys head was photoshopped in, too.
What Anne said was exactly what I thought when I first saw the picture!