Microsoft swapping race in website photo?

**Hades** · 08-26-2009, 12:34 PM

I am not sure if this goes in the politics forum for being about racism, or in the tech forum since it's related to Microsoft, I thought I'd put it here but if I made a mistake please moderators feel free to move it.

Quote:

Some highly suspect photo editing judgment is landing Microsoft in hot water.

In a photo on its U.S. Web site, an apparent stock photograph features three businesspeople--one white, one black, and one Asian. Microsoft's Polish subsidiary uses the same photo--except a white head is superimposed in place of the black person's head that appears on the U.S. site. The hand in both photos is the same.

Although Microsoft would be within reason to use a different photo on its Polish site--the country is very racially homogeneous--the company is coming under significant criticism for simply photoshopping a head onto someone else's body.

"In this day and age, this is shocking," wrote Twitter user Barry McCauley. "Unacceptable."

A Microsoft representative did not immediately have comment on the matter.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10317744-56.html

Attached both photos, because Microsoft just changed them in their websites and the modded one is no longer visible.

Allen Farlow · 08-26-2009, 01:37 PM

Caught red-handed. Wow, I would've thought a company such as MS would know better than to try something like that.

**Hades** · 08-26-2009, 01:55 PM

My guess is that they hired some cheap Arts company to make the design of the Polish edition and instead of taking another picture they just ripped off the guy's head in a 5 minutes photoshop session, you can see that they did a bad job (the guy still has a black hand, he's looking in the wrong direction compared to the others, and the lighting in both pictures is different).

A professional agency would just have purchased another picture, or left the black guy in there. Although there are not many black people living in Poland, it is not racist country. I've been living in Cracow for 2 years now and I've seen ads with black people on the street all the time. This racism comes not from the Polish society but from MS or their Art agency, they evidently don't know very much about advertising here.