Confused by Zoto: Are Proprietary Systems Good?
I’m confused but perhaps someone can help me. I thought that closed (proprietary) systems were a bad thing. Zeus technology recently announced Zoto, which seems to be a tool for adding extra information to images. Here’s a quote:
“Zoto’s primary website, www.zoto.com, enables users to access and share photographs from anywhere and with a proprietary system for adding metadata to images, Zoto makes it simple and intuitive to manage the photos that today’s picture-takers will accumulate over the coming years.”
As you can see, the tone of the press release seems to be that their proprietary system is a good thing. Am I missing something? Are you also confused by this? Wouldn’t it be better if the system was open and employed open standards?
p.s. I’m going to send a link to this posting to Kate Marshall, Marketing Executive at Zeus Technology. Hopefully she’ll post a response to my question.
September 29th, 2004 at 7:01 pm
I’m not confused by this because I don’t expect marketing blurbs to always make honest sense.
Assuming your confusion is real rather than disengenuous, proprietary is “good” for a company in that they are able to prevent competitors from using their technology. It is never better for users than “open”.
I don’t expect you’ll get a meaningful reply from the Marketing Executive.
October 4th, 2004 at 9:51 am
As I mentioned in an email to the original poster, I am not in a position to speak for Zoto, or divulge details on how their systems work. However I have forwarded your comment to Zoto and I’m sure that they will respond directly.
Kate Marshall
October 4th, 2004 at 4:02 pm
We use ZXTM in addition to a bunch of software that we wrote, and which we call, collectively, AZTK. AZTK is proprietary, in that we wrote it, designed it, we own it, and it isn’t GPL’d or open licensed in any way.
As it turns out, we happen to use ZXTM (a proprietary piece of software in its own right) in a way that is unique to Zeus’ user base. That’s why they decided to do a press release about us.
Concerning your comment regarding Open Standards, I’m not sure if you are lobbing this at Zeus, or Zoto. Only Zeus can speak for themselves on their standardization practices, but I’m more than happy to rebut concerning Zoto.
With Zoto, AZTK and our website are designed to allow people to categorize and search their photo collections which are housed on our site. As with any site, the users have a choice of whether they use the system or not, and whether they add that extra data, or not.
Regardless, and because of the fact users may place additional data on the system that wasn’t in their possession otherwise, Zoto decided early on to provide XML feeds on user’s accounts, providing a way for the data to be recaptured by other software, or services. It is in this way that we provide a means by which a user could potentially move the meta data on their photos to another platform.
While I am not stating that I endorse all Open Standards lobbying, I do think that it is reasonable that data created on a service should be accessible in some way if the user wished to migrate to another service.
Please keep in mind that most of the services that Zoto provides, it does so for no charge. Most Open Standards issues arise because of cost concerns, not, as in the webmail market, whether you can get your email off one service onto another (which you can’t).
Kord Campbell, CEO
Zoto, Inc.
October 4th, 2004 at 4:05 pm
And the only reason you did get a meaningful reply from us is because I currently have the bandwidth to do so. Had I been any busier, the poster above would have probably been correct.