A story has just emerged that Microsoft has been forced to apologise for what can only be described as the localisation equivalent of ethnic cleansing in an advertisement which appeared on its website. The original photo on the company’s US website showed two men, one Asian and one black, and a woman sitting at a conference table. Everybody’s smiling, everybody’s happy. But have a look at the same picture on Microsoft’s Polish site and the affable-looking black man’s head has mysteriously been replaced with that of a white man although his hands are left untouched. Unless he has been struck down with the same skin complaint that affected poor Michael Jackson, someone obviously reckoned that this guy just wasn’t up to the job of selling Microsoft to Poland and localised the living daylights out of him.

Consider yourself localised!

It’s not the first time, however, that Microsoft has gotten itself into trouble over racial and intercultural clumsiness. When Windows XP was released in Latin America, the Spanish version gave users the option of specifying their gender as either “Male” or “Bitch”. Then there was one of their computer games, I can’t remember what it was called, which used extracts from the Qur’an as lyrics for a catchy soundtrack for the on-screen violence and mayhem, quite understandably causing massive offence. But while these slip-ups could be attributed to the careless ignorance of Microsoft’s “Geopolitical Product Strategy Team” who apparently have “only a hazy idea about the rest of the world”, you have to wonder what goes through the mind of someone when they decide “Nah, the Chinese guy’s ok but let’s get rid of the black guy”.