Microsoft apologizes for digital head transplant Microsoft has apologized for digitally removing the head of a black man from a website photo and replacing it with the head of a white man. Yesterday, countless bloggers and other netizens noticed that Microsoft's Polish site had reproduced a photo from the company's main English language site - with one obvious change. The …
Generic "smiling people in suits with computers and plenty of racial/sexual diversity" photo from iStock* - $5
Copy of Photoshop - $700
Bad head-transplant job performed by the office intern - $7.50/hour * 5 minutes = 62 and a half cents.
Extracting a public apology from Microsoft - PRICELESS!
* NOTE:
"The company has not addressed the laptop in the middle of the photo. It appears to be an Apple MacBook. But like the black man's head, the Apple logo seems to have gone missing."
Stock photos can't have visible trademarks unless they're for strictly editorial use, so the photog who created the original would have had to edit out the Apple logo.
Somewhere in Microsoft...
heads are rolling...
and being digitally replaced with different heads
Anyway, I don't think it's a racial thing in particular. But it is very silly nevertheless. The monitor not plugged into anything and Macbook are of course even more silly (per M.B. and Cade Metz@El Reg.)
It is stunning that in an attempt to be culturally sensitive by using images of diversity that they can so utterly miss the very same goal of being representative in homogenous countries when sending it out to all the subsidiaries. It mocks itself.
Hate to say it because as an ex-pat I am just slamming my countrymen, but get a freaking clue and perhaps a document management system of some sort so the images can be swapped out easily. Whole world out there that doesn't speak a foreign language since to them English is a foreign language. They do not use MM/DD/YYYY. They have their own currency.
And when it's done this badly...
I don't think that the actual intention was to kick out the black guy, but rather to introduce a white one. Assuming that there are more men then women in IT in Poland (which is a pretty safe bet anywhere in the world) and considering that Poland has neither native nor immigrated black or Asian population of any significant number, you'd be hard pressed to find an IT office without a single white male in that country. I assume that that made someone believe that this skewed demographics would make it less likely for an average Polish IT worker to relate oneself to the people in the picture, and then he realized what's just the right thing to do. One awful Photoshop job later and every IT portal in the world is talking about them, bravo! Of course, this could have been done without decapitating the poor black guy by simply snapping a photo of a few local people and thus get some local mugs on the local site (probably) without all this fuss, but where's the fun in that?!
Why is this racist?
Chances are that in the target market (Poland) IT professionals are predominate white males or females - given that the percentage of darker skinned people living in Poland is extremely low ( http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090421123804AAgqIEs ) this is highly likely the case.
Good advertising should connect with the target market and typically this involves using local actors. MS's approach may be cheap or efficient depending on you view - but it is not necessarily racist.
"Some have said that in pairing a white man's head with a black man's hands, Microsoft is displaying a commitment to racial harmony."
Microsoft probably doesn't have the same level of fanaticism from its fanboys as, say, Apple whose fanboys would defend the most disturbing things, but in any case, such people are mere apologists for racism.
Is it Microsoft's fault, Microsoft's Polish business unit's fault, Polish society's fault? Perversely, Microsoft HQ is least likely to be at fault (this time, unlike on most other occasions) by merely being guilty of not supervising its underlings properly. Sadly, in their near monopolistic position, Microsoft Poland can (if we are charitable) be fairly accused of pandering to racist attitudes perceived in Polish society, instead of challenging such attitudes.
"Some have said that in pairing a white man's head with a black man's hands, Microsoft is displaying a commitment to racial harmony."
On planet earth, we like to characterise comments like this as 'tongue in cheek' or perhaps 'taking the piss'. Such mocking is characteristic of a characteristic of human nature generally known as 'humour'.
How you twerps with your bleating about fanbois and apologists managed to get past the moderatrix I don't know. You should be given a spanking and forced to spend a week posing for stock photos.
...and it's a better job than the MS photshop effort - at least the lighting is from the correct side!
MS had a 50% chance of getting the lighting angle right but seemingly a 0% chance of anyone spotting:
a) That an altered picture was being used
b) That the lighting was from the wrong angle
c) That their marketing department are idiots.
Why do people do this? The people that decide to do this must be really stupid. It is in the nature of adverts that many people will see them and, sooner or later, some people will see both adverts and spot the difference. All they have to do is just use a different picture with their chosen mix of ethnic/gender/age groups.
When I opened up the article I could only see the original image, and my first thought was "that guy in the middle's obviously been pasted over someone. Political Correctness Gone Mad etc".
Only to scroll down and find out my mistake.
Seriously, how is it that some people manage to look photoshopped in real life?
"How many people have looked at that page who otherwise wouldn't."
If the rule of "no publicity is bad publicity" has a limit, this is it. Every single person who has looked at that advert has thought "wow, what a bunch of stupid tossers". Even racists won't feel more inclined to use Microsoft, because they'd be annoyed that Microsoft used a black man in the first place. And you can't use the "raising awareness" excuse because everyone already knows about Microsoft, at least, everyone who would have come across this news article.
@ Craig 28
No it's not "much of the English speaking world", it's pretty much ALL of it. In fact Wikipedia says "the vast majority of the world's countries" (whether they are English speaking or not).
It's only the USA and a couple of tiny countries (like Belize and Micronesia) that routinely use MM/DD/YYYY.
Everyone else uses a sane system of either big or little endian.
I'd say that the black guy's head was pasted on too.
If you go to the original at http://www.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/default.mspx and zoom in (ctrl+), the head is too big. The wrist is a different color than the hand too.
Maybe MS just has a bunch of pics of empty suits, that they paste random heads onto.
@Sarah Bee: Too bad you're ignoring me, as this post contains a perfect line for a "that's what she said" response.
Microsoft are ze new vave. Hitler lives in Poland & is in contwol of Microsoft. Ve vill have no more blck people unless zey are in cages. Asians are cleaners so zey are allwight but ze blck people zink zey can be vhite but zey are wong. Cut zere heads off, zuck zere guts out zrow ze skins away, nobody knows how much I love my zree blcks every day.
Were in the 21st century, and someone changed a photo.
Only the person who changed the picture and who he works for and with know the real reason why.
So the options are either:
a) It was changed to reflect a younger dynamic group
b) It was racist.
c) On the page the image looked incorrect or clashed or contrast drawing the users attention away from some other item
Or perhaps it was one of a million other possible reasons.
This is a prime example of a problem with society, the word Racism has to be the most abused word we today know of, positive discrimination then exists.
So when something like this happens, were so forcefed thinking of others etc, and not wishing to offend people we end up doing just that by shouting "racist"
Microsoft didnt add a caption, nor did they add inference to his race / religion / orientation, all they did was replace it with a different image for whatever point they had to advertise, it was those who saw it first who implied it was racist thing to do.
Which means it cant possibly be racist as there was no reason for it to be seen as such, there was no victim other than those going round saying it was racist either offended because some person none of us actually know was removed or jumping on the bandwagon to appear to be in tune with modern society.
Plus microsoft even said sorry as they had no idea it would cause any sort of insult etc.
So ppl need to get off there high horse and just learn to live with everyone in the world and dump racism because now its creating the issues it was designed to name and shame.
LOOK closely at the hands at the cuff, there is something very unatural. I think the whole pic is cut and past from stock, even the womans hands look fake.
Photo manipulation like this has existed since the dawn of MS paint. This is not the first time Microsoft or other companies have done something like this.
And yeah it was done to reflect the population of the country, so what, people are make a big deal out of nothing.
Critisize Microsoft for being lazy.
Well, MM/DD/YYYY makes sense if you write it in WORDS rather than numbers (eg, September the ninth, two thousand and nine) but in digits, please use something that remotely resembles order-of-magnitude. Although at work I use DD/MM/YYYY as it is Aust. standard, I prefer YYYY.MM.DD as it has the same direction-of-magnitude as all the other numbers I use. I've got better things to do with my limited mental capabilities than work with special-case idio(t)syncrasies like that.
I always find the way USians try to call their measurement systems 'Standard' quite hilarious. NO!! it's "IMPERIAL" as in the King and the Boston Tea Party. Accept the 19th century end of monarchical power like the rest of the world already ;-P
You know, when I hear the term "Imperial", I don't automatically think of kings and queens, I think of feet, inches, fathoms, tons (imperial, not metric "tonne", or even the lighter US version of the ton).
Empire, Imperial and other similar words originate from scientific terms such as Empirical (rough meaning: definitive)
Nothing to do with oppressing USians into bearing arms :)
/etymology rant
as for the main story, isn't it just a simple case of brain catching up with mouth, as opposed to some conspiracy....
hmm, applying Occam's razor to the story allowed me to say something to defend MSFT on this one, but I feel dirty....very dirty...can we get a shower icon, dearest moderatrix?
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