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Comment by fogus | Hacker News Reader

97 pointsfogus53 comments

Clickable links:

http://www.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/default.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/poland/businessproductivity/default...

I have no idea why you're getting downvoted?

I definitely think the subject is more reddit HAHA, then HN intellectually stimulating, but that's getting upvotes and yet your clickable links are getting you downvoted!

My first thought was to just post the answer to save people the bother, but I didn't want to spoil the submitter's game.

At least having the links there might shave a few seconds off the time we are wasting on this story.

Even better, just use Greasemonkey to make all links clickable.

http://arantius.com/misc/greasemonkey/linkify-plus.user.js

This is hysterical. They forgot to photoshop his hand.

In case anyone is confused, this is what it looked like a few hours ago:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/18264/mspoland.jpg

I just found this on the other international Microsoft Amazon website: http://imgur.com/6FmaI.jpg

You're kidding. Please, please tell me that you're kidding.

Our of curiosity, how did you get that picture? Did you take it a few hours ago just for kicks? Or what?

Just curious, since they seem to have changed the pics now.

I pulled it from reddit (that's not my dropbox it's linking to). The reddit story was linked to an image like this, as opposed to linking to the two sites.

They did change the image on the polish site, but I promise you the link I posted is what it was like a few hours ago.

Dropbox seems awfully slow at the moment, and I see this link pasted everywhere at the moment. Is it really killing their bandwidth?

They removed the Native American from both ads.

you read my mind

I've been to Poland twice (Lodz) and didn't see any asian or black people at all, so I can only speculate that the asian man survived the 'cut' but the African-American did not because he would place the ad as being American.

Here in Australia we often get commercials on television that are made in the US then dubbed here, usually for toilet fresheners or other household products. You can always tell the difference because they're shot in soft focus and the colours look too saturated. They also tend to use the same four people to provide all the voice-overs: the Mum, the Dad, the little boy, and the little girl. They exclude African-Americans from those, too.

[UPDATE] My brother, who has in-laws in Poland, reckons there are some asian folks there now (migrants rather than children of migrants, as in the ad), but still pretty well zero black people.

From the reddit thread about the same thing: http://microlove.ytmnd.com/

It is quite hilarious...

absolutely fantastic! Thank you blhack - just what I needed - Hilarious!

Much ado about nothing. The demographics in Poland are not the same as the demographics in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Poland#Ethnic_g...

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.)

Is that a MacBook in front of the man with the many faces(tm)?

Looks like it is a mac and they may have edited out the logo. Can anyone else tell what's there?

A 12" PowerBook.

There's no ninja in the second ad. He's there in the first, but we all know that you can't see ninjas.

In the second one the chick's about to go fetch some coffees.

Does anyone else think it's odd that Microsoft's 404 page now redirects to Bing, using the path members as search terms? And if they were going to do that, why didn't they filter obvious stop words like "mspx" http://www.microsoft.com/france/businessproductivity/default... This discussion may be Reddit-worthy... more Hacker-Newsish topics: is this an appropriate way to handle 404s and is this an appropriate way to handle internationalization.

Just another reminder of the devastating disease that is vitiligo.

MS has acknowledged it and given a cookie cutter apology:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10317763-56.html

I'd imagine some design firm is getting a nasty call right about now...

TC has the original images: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/25/marketing-decapitation-...

The guy in the middle is white then black.

This was a useful comment as Microsoft obviously changed the site picture already...

I think it's really funny that his hands are still brown.

Looks like they fixed it. Anybody got a mirror?

The copyright dates are different!

microsoft sucks at photoshop

that's because they're only allowed to use paint...

funny, but extremely not HN-worthy. let's just merge with Reddit/Digg and get it over with. :)

Do you get vertigo looking down your nose?

lol

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