The 2007 WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey

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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. Microsoft is still the dominant player. Almost all of the survey respondents (92%) indicated that their products support the Windows platform.

The World Wide Web (62%) is recognized as the second biggest platform for respondents supporting it. 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. In our survey we distinguished between Web applications running on the Internet and those running on intranets/extranets. The latter category is supported by 47% of the respondents.

Microsoft .NET showed support from 36% of our respondents.

Linux (31%) increased a bit from last year's survey. UNIX (27%) has dropped below the Linux numbers for the first time. With no common Help standard, browser-based Help has become the most popular solution for user assistance in this arena.

The Mac has risen from 6% a few years ago to 15% in the current survey. The influence of iPods/iTunes appears to be increasing the strength of the platform.

Java sits at (17%). The JavaHelp standard has been uncoupled from Sun and dropped into the open source domain.

The broad label of PDAs are supported by 11% of respondents.

Other platforms with write-in votes include Solaris, and IBM mainframe, VMS, z/OS, and AS/400.