Just for giggles, I thought that I would wade into this nonsense and point out that the only thing remarkable about this “research” is how flawed the entire process was. I could write an entire paper on the lack of scientific method that led to the conclusions drawn by these faux researchers, but I’ll limit my remarks to a just a couple of blatant problems with this report.

If you follow back to the primary source of the information, you will find that it is not a legitimate peer reviewed research paper, but an online paper http://www.aptiquant.com/IQ-Browser-AptiQuant-2011.pdf published without outside review or comment by a company that hopes to make money from the results of this research by advising software developers. The researchers themselves are therefore not unbiased although there is nothing particular that would make them biased for or against MS products.

The MAJOR problem with this research is their (incorrect) ASSUMPTION that the average person who took the online IQ test had decision making power over which browser they would use on the computer that they used to take the test. (I won’t even go into the opinion that most professionals have about the validity of online IQ tests). Here is the problem with that assumption. The vast majority of personal computers sold (79%) are owned by companies, not individuals. During any given day, the average business computer is turned on and connected to the internet for far more hours than a privately owned computer. Assuming a normally employed population, the vast majority of people would have taken the test from their work computers, not their home computers.


Now, the issue becomes who decides what browser is used on the average business computer. I can give you some insight into what happens at my company which has over 450 desktop computers and another 100 or so tablets or laptops. We, like many companies only allow IT administrators to install software on all company computers and that includes the operating system, browsers, and all other software. The choice of browser in our company is driven by about 6 major browser based applications and the software developers of those applications specify to us not only which browser they will support but also the version. Not one of the six supports a browser other than IE. One of the most recent letters that I received from Garrison Enterprises, which provides our inspection and permitting software and database specified that they would support only 2 specific versions of IE for the upcoming year and the MIS department decided that they would go with version 7. So, no matter what the IQ of the user, any of the 550 computers used at our company is going to have IE 7 on it with no ability on their part to change that , and the same kind of decisions are made everywhere for the same reasons, pointing to the basic problem with the assumptions of this “research”.

Keith
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