Siu Lun

Having been here for a year, I can summarise the web development scene of Hong Kong as: fragmented and struggling to survive.

There are a huge amount of ‘developers’ and ‘designers’ who’ve set up their own company in Hong Kong.

This to me is really curious because most of those who have done that do not have the quality, money, education/knowledge to ever expand.

When I first arrived, one of my priorities was to try and find partners to start my company, and believe me I’ve asked a few, and none of those who’ve setup shop already like the idea of working with others. I guess that’s a reason why they run their own shop.

Maybe it’s just a difference in personality.

But you’d think the fact that Hong Kong is only a ‘city’ is enough reason to band together to make something big rather than fragment yourself and limit yourself forever to local unrewarding work.

Take a read at the most ridiculous example of why software patents need to banned

The web community world wide seriously has to stand up against this. Granted, these ridiculous patents is limited to the US, but what patents that are on the web doesn’t affect everyone? The web itself knows no boundaries of location.

What they’ve done is seemingly patented an architure of how the web works in modern days back in 2002. If I remember correctly AJAX did come about in or around 2002 officially but I suppose what’s interesting is that according to wikipedia, the land of wrong information. The term AJAX was ‘coined’ by a certain individual in 2005 yet in that patent it seems to have used the term (not entirely sure, but the reports around the web is using this term in relation to the patent)

Anyway though, I can’t understand why Flash is also infringing the patent, is it because of it’s ability to interact with javascript? ’cause I’m pretty sure Flash has been around since 1996.

Having been in Hong Kong for almost a year now, I’m increasingly concerned of Hong Kong’s status as one of the model city in Asia.

The current government does not seem to put enough focus on the development of Hong Kong in the world’s arena, but rather trying really hard to please the general public whom are mostly made out of selfish low income individuals and families with their concerns about every day life and also trying to please and help China develop.

The Hong Kong government did recently say they’ll try and develop 6 major industry for Hong Kong.

The six areas of focus are: increasing access to education, developing more private hospitals, encouraging professional standards and international recognition, making Hong Kong a “green” city, increasing research and development activities and boosting cultural and creative industries.

But can they really achieve what they’ve said in time? I think it is a little too late for them to be saying this, this should’ve started 2-3 years ago.

In summary the problems I have with Hong Kong at the moment are:

• Education system does not promote individual thinking, and they want to develop a creative industry?
• Paid short-term education to acquire ‘professional’ certification are not helping in creating good employees. Most of them are focused only on making money out of participant.
• Most teachers themselves are not professional and not good enough to educate the next generation
• Hong Kong does not promote energy efficiency, with all those roof tops and high sky-scrapers, you won’t see any greenery or solar panels.
• Hong Kong’s ‘land and rent’ issues is not an issue, it’s just that Hong Kong is too focused on the development of Hong Kong Island, why don’t we establish another commercial centre in the new territories or even near the airport? There is no price or land issues there!!!! Don’t just focus on building higher buildings around Central

Hong Kong while should work with China should not forget how they strived in the first place. i.e. with the relationships of the west by being able to speak English! Hong Kong while is officially a two language city, I would say 99% of it’s populace cannot speak or write proper english. Even those who ‘claim’ they can – they really can’t, they can speak it and you can understand it but their grammer is bad, their pronouciation is bad, the use of words is bad, their understanding is bad.

The only way I can see this being resolved is if Hong Kong place a mandatory requirement for kindergardens and primary school to teach and USE english as the communication language rather than waiting until they get to University. You see, because most people speaks chinese in every day life anyway, there is no way that the next generation’s chinese level would decline, so what they need is more exposure to english and being able to practise, because other than the 1 or 2 hour lessons they take on english which is more like the teacher telling you about english words, they don’t get any chance to actually practise and use it.

The next thing I’ll mention, which is the culture in Hong Kong. Parents in Hong Kong are way too patronising to their kids, it isn’t just about education as half the time kids spends their time with their families, but family ‘values’ taught in Hong Kong culture is to be ‘realistic’, don’t aim high. Parents, being parents think their kids can’t do anything right, which is stupid. I came from one of those family until my family broke apart so I can completely understand that and I’m in some ways grateful that I had my own development time.

I think this issue is hard to solve but the Hong Kong government should promote good parenting by telling parents not limit their kid’s potential and to trust in what they want to do. Parents really do not know what’s best for their kids, the kid knows whats best, as in the end, they’re their own, the parent’s role should only be to guide the kids, and not to dictate.

Lastly, the services sector is really not governed, there are no ‘return’ policies for consumers, there are no ‘unfair’ charges regulations to public services such as telecoms. One example is that all telecomms in Hong Kong tricks/tie you to a long contract, then if you really have to cancel a contract, you basically have to pay off the rest of your contract. That is _wrong_ and the citizens of Hong Kong are being controlled by these monopolies.

Hong Kong wants to keep it’s status as a special and ‘advanced’ city in all of China? In my opinion, it’s probably already lost or on-par with the major Chinese cities and wayyyy far behind international standards.

Pick up the pace Hong Kong, ’cause right now, you’re starting to smell bad.