Synereo will definitely be competition.

Comparing the source-code for both platforms, Synereo seems to have a competitive advantage for a number of reasons. One, its made in Scala which is certainly more readable than C++ which steemd is built on. Two, transactions are more abstracted than Steem. Steemd seems more coupled to the functionality of steemit. for example, the "trending" and "popular" categories are part of the steemd api. This seems to me like an application implementation, not a blockchain daemon function.

I am closely watching both and will be excited to see how each platform grows.