Microsoft Sucks at PhotoShop

About

This is an example of a user-submitted news story that became a forced meme that has been widely regarded as a legitimate meme anyway.

Origin and Spread

On August 25th, 2009 TechCrunch posted two user-submitted scans of a Microsoft ad. In the US version, te ad featured a photo of an Asian man to the left, a black man at the center, and a white woman to the right. There isalso a Macbook in the photo, and the other computer’s monitor is not plugged in.

When a version of the Ad was used to reach Polish audiences, the photo had been touched-up to clear up some discrepencies. It was not the Macbook, nor the unplugged monitor. Instead, the black man’s head had been replaced with a white man.

[if there is a statement from Microsoft, we should find it.]

In the comments section of the article, most people discussed the racism of replacing a black man with a white man vs. the decision to reflect relative absense of black people in Poland.

The first commenter to mention parodies was Michael A Langer at 3:19 PM Pacific Time.

Does anyone else sense parody’s coming…..?

No less than six minutes later, Jason Kincaid replied with a YTMND – Microsoft What is Love

Another user pasted Gary Busey’s head into the pic, and more memes followed in the comments.

That same day, the story was picked up by Engadget, and the Engadget link was posted to Buzzfeed.

The following day, the story was also picked up by the BBC with the title Microsoft in racism row

The BBC story was also submitted to Buzzfeed that day.

Later that night, a thread appeared on VGchartz.com where even more photoshopping took place.

• BBC: Microsoft in web racism row

Also on the 26th, TechCrunch posted a followup story, declaring (or forcing) that this had become a meme. They further incentivized the creation of photoshops by announcing that a TechCrunch T-shirt would be awarded to the most creative photoshop.

• It’s a Meme by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch on August 26th, 2009

Regardless of the fact that TechCrunch forced the meme by declaring it so early, the photoshopping continued. In this case, the forced meme was embraced despite being forced.

On September 4th, 2009, SomethingAwful compiled all the photoshopping that had been happening in their forums into a Photoshop Phriday post titled Microsoft’s Emerging Markets