iWeb highlights the dangers of being an ISV

Yesterday, Apple introduce iLife ’06, which includes the new major component iWeb. From the pretty pictures on the Apple site, iWeb looks like a nice product. It’s nicely integrated with the other parts of iLife, making it easy to publish all of the “stuff” that you collect up digitally. As an independent software developer, though, I can really feel for the guys at Karelia. Their Sandvox website tool was set to enter beta soon. They moved up the beta as soon as they heard about iWeb, but iWeb’s emergence is going to make things very tough on them, I think.

Safari’s RSS support wasn’t really a risk for Zesty News. But, Zesty News is general enough that some large company could decide to target the same features Zesty does. The safest way to be an ISV is to go after a niche. But, unless you’re really into that niche, that’s certainly not the most fun way to be an ISV.

Update: it’s worth noting that a huge difference between Sandvox and iWeb is that iWeb only publishes to .Mac and Sandvox can publish to any web hosting company. That’s a big difference.