London: A tiny shading error in a computer program involved Microsoft in a multi-million dollar business fiasco, the head of the firm's geopolitical strategy unit has disclosed.

Tom Edwards told the International Geographical Union congress in Glasgow how erroneously colouring eight out of 800,000 pixels dark rather than light green to represent Kashmir's disputed territory as non-Indian in Windows 95's time zone feature had led to the product being banned in India.

The Kashmir example was just one of a series of embarrassing mistakes that Mr Edwards owned up to on behalf of Microsoft programmers.