Our organizations embrace multiple platforms as a way to maximize product usage and to offset the high cost of software development. However, this results in many difficult challenges for software developers. In our part of the development process, the design and implementation of user assistance components is dictated largely by the nature and number of different platforms we need to support. In our survey we asked respondents to identify all of the platforms their products run on.

The figure below shows that almost all of the survey respondents (95%) indicate that their products support the Windows platform . (A breakdown of support within the Windows platform is described in the Windows Help section of this report.)

The World Wide Web is recognized as the second biggest platform with 65% of respondents supporting it. That is a 7% increase over 2001 survey results. Most software organizations appear to either already have versions of their products that can be delivered over the Web or they have some sort of strategy for doing so in the future. Server-side deployment of user assistance will be a growing issue for us over the next few years. This report includes a special section on Web-based Help.

The presence of UNIX continues to be strong with 34% of us supporting it. With at least a dozen flavors of UNIX and no common Help standard, browser-based Help has become the most popular solution for user assistance in this arena.

Other platforms with numerous write-in votes include OS2, VMS, DOS, OS/390, Solaris, AS/400, and NetWare.