Is Microsoft Racist?

[The_Echo]

To be honest, both the white guy's head and the black guy's head look shopped onto that body. But that's just me.

EDIT: Could we all just shut the hell up about racism? Seriously? Anything that involves whites and blacks and ambiguous activity is considered racist anymore, and I'm fucking sick of it.

 

[AceDiamond]

So Microsoft does a bad photoshop. That's hardly racist. Many bad advertising moves by companies result in something like that happening. No, to make people truly wonder about your designs on racial purity, you gotta do something like this:

Spoiler: image

 

[Joos]

I suppose there aren't particularly many black people in Poland, and that the marketing department thought (probably correctly) that a polish crowd wouldn't be able to identify with the picture. This is to please the target audience, not to discriminate black people, since the advertisement was aimed at the polish.

No, I do not think MS is racist and the article reeks of the over-the-top PC that makes me disgusted with today's society.

 

[hazakura]

I doubt it's microsoft's doing,if it is. Then it's only the Marketing branch that's racist.

 

[Aardvark]

Microsoft, the Pope, Cigarette warnings, Standardised tests, the Moon, Bananas and Kittens are all racially biased, according to one crackpot or another.

 

[AceDiamond]

So Microsoft does a bad photoshop. That's hardly racist. Many bad advertising moves by companies result in something like that happening. No, to make people truly wonder about your designs on racial purity, you gotta do something like this:

Spoiler: image

The funny thing about that ad and racial purity is that it suggests interracial homosexual fetish sex. Not something 'racial purity' people are a big fan of.

Well I don't know about you but frankly I'm not that big into S&M so when I see one person holding the other by the chin and looking like they're about to scratch their eyes out, I don't think "hot sex is a comin'" XD

My point is that the vast majority of the Netherlands didn't think along your way either.

 

[AceDiamond]

I doubt it's microsoft's doing,if it is. Then it's only the Marketing branch that's racist.

Yeah, but it's not like the other branches of Microsoft don't want you to associate the efforts of the marketing branch with the rest of Microsoft. They have to take the bad with the good.

That's what it means to be a corporate entity--all your parts are 'you'. I don't see why all the people in this thread are saying stuff like this: a corporation is different from a country or a neighborhood or a city.

Well this is the Internet, the place where a company's various departments are not responsible for the company at a whole and vice-versa.

 

[AbsoluteVirtue18]

Both the pictures look kind of fake.

 

[MegaPigeon]

Microsoft certainly aren't racist. Sadly, this is the way the advertising industry works. They'll pretty much choose models or change adverts to accomodate different countries, which sometimes involves actually using someone's race as a deciding factor.

Ad Companies are fucking idiots. Stuff like this is pretty normal. The only thing that makes this any different is that it's a Microsoft ad and it's possibly the worst photoshop ever made.

 

[darthzew]

Your question is made irrelevant by this simple quote from the article:
"Microsoft said it had pulled the image and would be investigating who made the changes. It apologised for the gaffe."

So, yes, there is likely a racist Microsoft employee, but that does not make Microsoft racist as a whole.

 

[AceDiamond]

So Microsoft does a bad photoshop. That's hardly racist. Many bad advertising moves by companies result in something like that happening. No, to make people truly wonder about your designs on racial purity, you gotta do something like this:

Spoiler: image

The funny thing about that ad and racial purity is that it suggests interracial homosexual fetish sex. Not something 'racial purity' people are a big fan of.

Well I don't know about you but frankly I'm not that big into S&M so when I see one person holding the other by the chin and looking like they're about to scratch their eyes out,

Yeah, that's totally not what I saw. I was thinking she's going to grab her boob or something.

That's...kinda weird you saw that as an image of such specific and extreme violence.

Your forgetting, this is Sony. There's no way they were going for lesbian sex. If they were going for Lesbian sex, in The Netherlands, people would not have complained. Take it up with them, not with me. Or better yet, read the whole article which has more images (including one in the opposite direction) and interpret as you will [http://www.joystiq.com/2006/07/04/ad-critic-sonys-racially-charged-psp-ad/]

EDIT: The better question here is, given that the two models are representing their respectively colored-PSPs, what makes you think that Sony is advocating inanimate-object tribadism?

 

[The Hairminator]

If anything this reflects badly upon Poland, Microsoft thinking THEY'RE racists.

 

[Anonomnom]

Its not like they Shoop'ed in A bucket of KFC and some watermelons. Give Micro$oft a break.

 

[Monshroud]

This isn't racism. This is demographics. Pick up Ebony Magazine and tell me how many advertisements feature white people, or asian people, or canadians... How many advertisements in 'Cosmo' feature men?

You try to make your advertisements reflect the culture of the people you are advertising to. Poland isn't exactly known for it's high black population. So they took an image and did a crap job removing a black person and swapping it with a white person rather than create another advertisement at a higher cost.

Now if every MS advertisement had <insert race / gender> removed, then yes, that would be racist.

 

[A010110100101102]

I'm calling bullshit on this. Microsoft can shop better than that.

i second that.

 

[Iron Mal]

No, because Microsoft is not a person, it is a collection of people, some of who may be racist.

I believe you've got it perfectly right there.

People are racist, countries/companies/organisations (mostly)/cities/professions etc are not.

For starters, why is it important that a single person has been changed in a picture? (and rather badly at that), also, would we have this same problem if it was changed from a white man to a black man?

 

[Dioxide20]

They spelled "apologized" wrong, I think it's another one of those fake news articles, remember the zombie invasion article made up so it looked like a BBC article?

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/05/01/london-is-not-quarantined-by-zombie-swine-flu-yet-tweetmeme-lets-hoax-bbc-story-go-unchecked/

(not the actual article, but it talks about it)

and besides, that looks pretty poorly done, you would think that if Microsoft wanted to do it, they would have at least changed the hand color, and it would have been done to all of the sites that the picture was posted on, not just the polish one...

 

[are.you.the.god.its.me.vader]

hahahahah, this made me laugh...is that healthy?

 

[TheLefty]

"The white head and black hand actually symbolise interracial harmony. It is supposed to show that a person can be white and black, old and young at the same time," said one blogger on the Photoshop Disasters blog.

Bull.

On topic, both heads look like they're bad photoshop jobs. Though it is possible that they changed it to better represent the polish population, as suggested in the article, but that almost suggest the Poland still has racists as a large part (which I highly doubt). But no I do not think Microsoft is racist, just full of idiots.

Who cares if they are or are not?

Would it be considered racist if a black man's face was photoshopped onto a white man?

Yes.

 

[frickendevil]

I feel microsoft is racist because the original image didn't include my minority, the white male. Thank you to poland for fixing that for me.