LMAO Winrar

Lol those photos are laughable!

Apparently, whiting him out isn't doing Microsoft any favors either judging by the backlash.

this is so f@#ing true :)

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.

The most sensible answer is to take another fucking picture... I don't find the picture offensive at all. I just think it is stupid to alter this. Like, when I worked at a resturaunt we changed from Coke to Pepsi. And all the pictures around the store with coke had to be changed... they photo shopped them all... are they really that cheap where they can't put a damn bottle of pepsi next to a plastic pizza and take a picture? Or have a case full of pepsi on the ground and have someone bending down picking it up?

Funny when people try to make the racist thing just to black people. I would have thought it was racist even if they changed from white to black or white to asian. They could have taken a new picture or not changed the picture at all. Another thing is that Polen have foreign people so the excause for marketing is not good enough, what about the asian? You cant even complain of things that are wrong now days without being laboured as the sensitive person who cant understand the society. I'm not saying that Microsoft is racist. I am saying that big companies should watch out doing such stupid things. Was it really worth to photoshop that picture? I would like to hear the discussion they had when they changed the picture.

Regarding the first bolded text, specific to the USA, racism being defined as black/minority disadvantage has been built into our society by Congress for quite a few years, i.e. - affirmative action.  We have state laws which dictate that certain classes (race, creed, religion, sex, age, etc.) cannot be used to discriminate when choosing a candidate for hire.  Yet the affirmative action laws at the Federal level dictate that companies maintain quotas based on race.  That builds into the think of people in corporate America the idea that you need to be careful turning down a minority candidate, but not a white candidate.  This has begun to permeate our thinking in other ways as well.

As far as the second point, I have no idea why the did that as I don't have a way to read the mind of the person who altered the photo.  It is a good point you raise, but it still doesn't prove that the motivation was racism.

Lastly, the third bolded text is a broad generalization.  Microsoft is a company comprised of tens of thousands of employees in many locations, speaking many different languages and living in very different societies.  It seems that we sometimes think of large companies as monolithic organizations with impossibly tight communications and control systems that allow the senior management at headquarters to review and approve all decisions and actions in all locations.  This is an impossibility.  Having worked for a company with 12,000 employees, I can easily attest to how incredibly difficult and impractical this would be.  Often times we can't even control what's done by all 2500 employees at our headquarters (where I work).   Sometimes marketing campaigns go out that only a handful of people even know about and things have to be pulled when a customer complains.

Simple rules for less stressful living:

1. Most people are NOT out to get us

2. Most people are struggling to get by just like we are

3. Not assuming the worst in people can often go a lot further than trying to coerce them into compliance

4. Trying to live in a PC world creates more stress than it solves... perhaps we all need thicker skins.

I agree. I always find it funny when people use this weak argument because their unoriginality doesn't allow them to come up with a valid point to disprove racism.

I also agree with this.

Everyone defending this has yet to give a solid point on why this is not racist. Someone mentioned trying to meet a deadline? LOL you can't be serious. They have time to photoshop one head but not the other? I've seen people photoshop stuff like this within a matter of minutes. At least come up with a better reason.