In the first picture, he is a smiling, grandfatherly black man, with salt and pepper hair and a smart grey suit. In the second, the suit remains, but the black man has become white, and a decade younger, with slicked-back hair. Yet not all is different: he still has a black hand.

“Empower your people with the IT tools they need,” reads the caption. But the use of tools to change the image — used in its original form to promote Microsoft’s business productivity software on its American website — has caused outrage.

In the original picture, the black man sits between a white woman and an Asian man. On the Polish version of the same website, there is not a black face to be seen. The two versions were widely circulated on the internet yesterday as it emerged that Microsoft had doctored the image to remove the black man.

No explanation for the change was given, but many believed that the image was “whitened” because Poland is one of the world’s most ethnically homogeneous countries. Almost 97 per cent of the population claim Polish nationality largely due to its radically altered borders after the Second World War.