OPEN systems are now an established fact of life in the Hongkong computer market, but their companion, client-server computing, has been slower to find commercial acceptability.
Since the Hongkong Government's adoption of Unix-based systems as its preferred mid-range platform, the industry-standard operating system has gone way ahead.
It seems now that few new development projects based on proprietary computing technology take place outside the mainframe sphere.
This broad acceptance of open systems, however, has not so far been matched by the adoption of the client-server computing.
Part of the reason for this slow take up is that, unlike the move to Unix, the adoption of client-server represents a major shift in the way computing should be done.
Johnathan Chiu, Hewlett-Packard Hongkong's project manager for application systems, believes there was still a lot of misunderstanding in Hongkong about client-server computing.