Did that study show IE users are stupid? Or that the pollsters who did it are fools?

"I just want to make it clear that the report released by my company did not suggest that if you use IE that means you have a low IQ, but what it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer." –Leonard Howard, CEO, AptiQuant.

We are not calling IE users stupid, he's saying. We simply regret, for your sake, that you are so stupid.

Which should put a cap on the whole bucket of stink.

If they weren't obviously too stupid to understand they were being trolled, it wouldn't be IE users who would be mad at AptiQuant.

It would be the people who hire AptiQuant for theoretically valid quantitative assessments of job candidates, not to mention pollsters, statisticians, and anyone who dislikes junk-science masquerading as sociological research.

Every company needs to do a certain amount of self-promotion, especially within its own area of expertise.

It is de rigeur for any company trying to sell the depth or freshness of its insight, or skills in analysis and market evaluation to put out data that is interesting, revelatory or useful about its own sphere of expertise.

It's the only way to give potential customers a taste of your product.

Putting out a poorly designed study with a shallow and obviously biased analysis is just bad practice, especially if your conclusion – however provocative and viral – is so obviously unsupportable by other data.

IE users may very well have done poorly on the version of an IQ test posted by AptiQuant. That doesn't mean even those who took the test are less intelligent than those who took it using other browsers.

Scoring poorly on a short, unproctored, incomplete version of an IQ test doesn't indicate much about the IQ of one person, let alone the rest of the IE-using population. The sampling methodology saw to that.

For the record, I really dislike using IE, and avoid it whenever possible.

That's a choice based on personal preference, however.

Like most people, I assume those who make personal choices that are different from mine do so because they are impaired in some way – cursed with bad taste or burdened by a poor upbringing, deep character flaws and possible psychoses that make effective decision-making impossible.

That doesn't mean I consider it valid that someone else smear the whole benighted lot of them simply for their obviously poor choice of Web browser.

And it doesn't mean I or any of AptiQuant's customers should have any more respect for the company for having presented bad analysis and poor research as a vehicle for headlines at the cost of their own credibility.