I'm having a hard time seeing what the fuss is about.

A little thought experiment: If Microsoft had created a whole new ad with all white models for the Polish market, would that have been ok? I just had a look at the Microsoft Hong Kong website and all the people in the pictures are Asian. Is that ok?

Are we objecting to the fact that they have tailored their advertising to their market, or just the fact that they've done it cheaply and semi-incompetently?

Any publicity is good publicity.

So what's new?

Microsoft has been copying Apple for years. This is just another form of their plagiarism.

That's nothing, they submitted a fake video in _court_ during their antitrust trial.

In this case they are obviously working on the quota system: one black, one white, one Asian, at least one man, at least one woman. The quota in Poland may be different than that in North America.

People are way to jumpy latley..... the ad was just being tailored to the target demographic..... kinda funny that they forgot to change his hands in fact....

Microsoft is not in "hot water" and has nothing to apologise for. One of the toughest PR tasks faced by multinational enterprises is "tuning in" promotional campaigns to the cultural and yes, racial, nuances of differing national markets so as to not convey too much of a "foreign head office" influence. Microsoft's Polish subsidiary was obviously attempting something along those lines. I won't say that this particular effort was as well thought out and executed as it might have been, but it hardly qualifies as fodder for sensational headlines.

They forgot to photoshop the white Mac book out of the picture.

@Matt Innes

"We" are objecting to the cheapness and incompetence. I'm not sure how you distinguish between "semi-incompetence" and "full-on incompetence". Did they use Asian models for that Hong Kong ad you saw? Or did they just paste Asian heads on top of bodies with tanned hands?

There's something insulting about cutting out someone's face or head, don't you think?