They could have at least chosen another picture, rather than photoshopping the original one.

I get the impression that in large companies it's standard practice to photshop ads while internationalizing rather than looking for new stock photos with the color schemes and angles.

Yeah, I'll give you that that's pretty odd.

As a result of the Photoshopping, notice the duplication of the window ledge right behind the guy's head.

Oh! The _white guy_ is the one photoshopped in! That's not the sort of thing I'm used to seeing.

If that's the case, I wonder why the Asian guy stayed in the picture.

There's an enormous thread over at reddit discussing this right now as well:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/9e157/microsoft_poland_...

It's not damning, but it is interesting.

You know... There is a limit to tailoring an advertisement towards a specific group and plain racism. Is the black guy offensive to the people involved in producing the page? Did they think he was offensive to the clients in Poland? What would we be discussing if someone photoshopped burkas on the women on the same site?

There is no way to make this look good.

This has reminded me of number 4 from http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=stock_photos

Say rather, the Polish are more upset at being edited out of Microsoft's media representations than your average white male. Install Visual Studio and watch the pictures some time. Now look around your office. Notice the difference?

Same thing has happened to U.S. television. Watch TV from the 1960s or 1970s. Watch The Rockford Files on Hulu, for example. The contrast between then and today is amazing. You'll see white men demanding and receiving respect. Today, they're the butt of every joke.

(Oh, the above is totally non-PC. So please down-mod it with a vengeance before you go back to your masturbatory religious devotions to the modern gods Diversity and Equality. But do remember me the next time a girl turns you down in a bar for not being as masculine as her ideal.)

Dear asshole,

It was the black man who was edited out.

Perhaps this correction will serve as a reminder not to jump to conclusions; particularly ones which match your passionately held (and, by the way, disgusting) preconceptions.

Additionally I hope my use of 'asshole' above will hit home, setting you upon a course of introspection and self doubt, at which point you realize that you are, in fact, an asshole.

You will then sell all your worldly possessions and motorbike to South America in a journey of self-discovery, never to be heard from again.

Now you know how it feels for me to see a bunch of Microsoft promotional material without any white males. To be edited out. Asshole.

Why do you presume I care about your feelings? Quite frankly, the worldview you espouse deserves to be edited out.

This looks serviceable: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/scz/bik/1329392859.html

> Today, they're the butt of every joke.

I think this trend probably peaked a few years ago (Family Guy is a good example.) You can actually see it reversing if you watch King of the Hill: the earliest episodes generally show Hank as a small minded redneck, whereas later episodes portray him as a lone voice of sanity.

Anyways, if you look outside of comedies, there are plenty of masculine male leads in popular shows (Jack Bauer comes to mind.) As for race, I can't even think of a popular drama where the male lead is black (and the other characters aren't.) But maybe I just don't watch enough TV.

I think it's tough to say when that particular trend "peaked." Consider:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3s8sEYzHWQ or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_TGQ7rGL-Q

Or even:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1MgjQOR_JA

;)

There's a specific genre, "fat-dumb-slob-married-to-woman-who-always-knows-best", which Family Guy is the pinnacle of (it's an old genre of course, related to the theme of women marrying beneath their status, which has been a major literary device since time immemorial.)