The 2005 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. The percentages increased over last year's results for all of the platforms except "intranet/extranet." This suggests that the software industry is becoming more diversified in its choices for application development. However, Microsoft is still the dominant player. Almost all of the survey respondents (95%) indicated that their products support the Windows platform.

The World Wide Web (61%) 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 49% of the respondents.

Microsoft .NET showed support from 35% of our respondents.

The presence of UNIX (31%) continues to be strong. 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.

Linux (29%) increased significantly from the 22% in last year's survey. Java (22%) increased its representation from 16% in last year's poll. The broad label of PDAs are supported by 12% of respondents and 10% for the Macintosh.

Other platforms with write-in votes include OS/390, z/OS, AIX, VMS, Qnix, and Solaris.