Yes, competition is good: Author searching Some via RSS
As I said, this time of year all the vendors go wild annoucing updates and new offerings. A current trend is better ways to disambiguate authors and do author searching. It used to be that WoS was the only decent solution for doing affiliation searching and controlling on author was sketchy in all of the databases. Here's a little list of what we have right now with older solutions first and then the new announcements.

Proquest
Records link to "authority profiles" from "scholar universe" -- cool, but not on all people or on all records, limited information.

CSA/Illumina
When CSA bought COS I wasn't sure what was going to happen. Now it seems that a lot of authors link to their COS record.

Scopus
See press releases, etc. Very cool actually and really quite useful (well, of course there are known issues with Scopus and coverage but where coverage is more complete it works well)

ISI Web of Science
See press release. These tools seem to be listed as in development so time will tell.  ¶ 9:23 AM| |cites (technorati) |