Ethnic makeover, courtesy of Microsoft

Is this a Polish thing? Thirteen years after the Ford motor company was condemned internationally for whiting-out black and Asian faces from a line-up of staff in promotional material for the country, Microsoft has done the same, this time under the slogan: "Empower your people with the IT skills they need" (such as Photoshop, I guess). Its three happy "employees" sitting at their desk behind their computers are Chinese-Asian, a black man and a white woman in the original image; but when posted on its Polish website the black man's head had been cut off and replaced by a white man's.

Yes, Poland is a predominantly white country, but are they really so repulsed by black people that they'd refuse to buy products from the world's biggest software company if it had any association with dark skin? And surely Microsoft would have known the amount of damage its image could suffer once the truth emerged. It took Ford years to recover from its 1996 exposé. The car giant was forced to pay compensation to the five whited-out staff, and the furore helped lift the lid on discriminatory workplace practices that had been tolerated at its Dagenham car plant.

Microsoft has today apologised and dropped the altered image from its website, but is still to explain how the "error" occurred. We do not yet know whether this was a one-off glitch, or evidence of a systemic problem. Was the decision taken in Poland, or at a European or even global level?

It is also an indication of the perceived status of black people in the country that the east Asian employee also featured did not receive an ethnic makeover.

There are many instances of intolerance in eastern Europe, which has until recently seen relatively little migration from other regions of the world. The president of Poland and its former prime minister, the Kaczyński twins, represent the rightwing Law and Justice party. Black footballers are routinely booed and jeered – as English players discovered in Slovakia in 2002, but as also commonly occurs in domestic matches in Poland, Hungary and Romania.

In the west, too, the lack of black faces in promotional material – be it magazine covers, corporate brochures or TV advertisements – highlights a similar corporate fear of "what will the customers think if we dare to have a dark face?" Beyoncé was whitened for a L'Oréal advert. And, even worse, when Time magazine was covering the trial of OJ Simpson for murder, they chose to darken his image. There are those who say it's natural for a multinational company to gear its adverts towards the countries it's targeting. And, yes, if they were promoting themselves in African countries they might have an all-black cast. But the original was a multi-racial advert, a "United Colours of Benetton" take on the camaraderie within the company. To say that black people can't fit in with this image in certain countries of the world sends out a message that appeases those who discriminate. Even in the 1990s, this was shocking. In the 21st century, it is unforgivable.

Joseph Harker, assistant comment editor of the Guardian.