Thus, a modeling environment only available on Windows NT, for example, would be incompatible with Eric's Macintosh platform. This problem is also found in the context of platform configurations. A model may be programmed using features available in a certain release of the modeling environment software which in turn may be limited to a certain release of the operating system. For Carolyn, once she was connected to DecisionNet, compatibility was not a concern. Carolyn was able to choose from four candidate providers because the expanded market horizon offered by the Digital Library system encouraged competition and innovation.
Many decision problems require a combination of technologies to provide a satisfactory solution.
For the Board of Director's meeting, Carolyn might have to extract problem-specific data from a database server, cast it in the format of the modeling language, submit it into the modeling environment for execution, and then present the results graphically. Since each of the technologies has its own input and output formats, data interchange to enable interoperability is an important requirement. A mong the challenges faced by Providers, those that relate to the market are symmetric to the problems encountered by Consumers. As new decision technologies are developed, providers need to attract users. Currently, it is difficult for specialized software providers to cost-effectively reach consumers.