It's always interesting to see how people overreact to things like this. For those of you who feel offended by what was done by who-knows-what MS department or advertising agency, very possibly not even located in the USA and likely isolated from Microsoft senior management, how would you have felt if the original had a white man, and the ad had been changed to replace him with the image of a black man?
Would it have still been racism? Of course not. This is the problem with the current definition of racism in the USA... an action is only racist if it in some way appears to disadvantage someone who is black. If someone who is white appears to be disadvantaged, well, that's okay. And I don't want to even get into a discussion of how we got to this point.
Perhaps the moral of the story is for people to take a deep breath after seeing something like this and really consider *why* it was done. Remember, it's very likely that it wasn't done out of spite, hate, etc., particularly if it was to sell a product. Most of the time this sort of thing is someone trying to achieve a marketing objective, reach a specific audience, etc. It can seem callous or indifferent--depending on your point of view--but I seriously doubt the person who did this was thinking "we absolutely have to get rid of that black man in the picture so that blacks will be under-represented in our advertisements." That would be racist thinking, but that's just not a believable situation.
People seem to have become hyper-sensitive to this sort of thing in the past 20 years or so, and I think it just promotes more tension between the races as whites begin to think that they can't do or say anything without being accused of being racist.
