BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture

There are a number of reasons why it could be said to be foolish to pursue the development of ThoughtFiler.

One of the biggest reasons is that it’s becoming a trendy area. Many have ideas about it.

“Consolidating your stuff to an online service is an exploding area right now – lots of the storage services are differentiating themselves by offering this type of thing.” [Source]

A few more cons on the web side:

• Google. ’nuff said really. There are enough hints already that they eventually want to store everyone’s stuff. GDrive. Also, here. Also, now with confirmation of their forthcoming calendar they will have one more piece of the PIM puzzle. On the other hand, the (current) lack of integration between most of their services could be seen as a benefit to myself or others, at least in the short term. Also, the growing distrust and uncertainty of Google’s future plans could be a good thing – they don’t seem to realise that most people don’t want all of their files out of their control.
• Yahoo. These guys already have some leanings in the ThoughtFiler direction (sort of), ala their Addressbook, Briefcase, Calendar, Notepad, Wallet (?maybe), and 360.
• BackPackIt & Remember the Milk. These guys are up and running now and have a user base. However, they have chosen to basically service one PIM element: to-dos. In other words, they could be considered only partial competitors.

All the various new ajax home pages [source] “could” be said to be competing in my marketspace:

• Eskobo, favoor,Fold.com, Google,Goowy (Flash, not Ajax), Gtalkr (Flash), HomePortals,Microsoft Live, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, Wrickr, Zoozio.

…but realistically, at least at this stage, they are not really competitors, but more something that people may initially confuse as such (until they use one or more of them).
There is more competition from the desktop side however:

• Ecco Pro (even if it’s no longer being developed)
• Info Select
• Keynote
• sqlDesktop
• Treepad
• UltraRecall
  

Hmmm…