The reason to use 7zip in the first place is that its compression mechanism, LZMA, is far more effective at compressing than say Info-Zip. Many, many users have it installed on Windows and it is available for Mac OS X as well. 7zip (or its unix/linux sibling p7zip) is today bundled with almost all Linux distros and Solaris. This post will explain how to create 7zip self-extracting archives for multiple platforms.
