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Mighty Retrospective

blog.chaselambda.com

101–107 of 107 posts

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#101

I wish Mighty had succeeded for a different audience. The core value prop "make figma faster" was not very compelling--people who need to use Figma can buy a mac. You know who does struggle with slow computers and memory issues? Call center employees who have to run Front, Slack, Chrome, and probably one or two other electron-based apps. At our startup (not in USA), these issues are so bad we've ended up getting peop…

They should have been competing with Citrix and others in the B2B space rather than in the B2C space with MacBook users. I am not sure why they didn't, even with something like Citrix they could outcompete it on UX alone, like Zoom did with Webex, ie lower latency, it "just works" etc.

Probably due to time constraints. B2B takes a long time to get moving, B2C allows fast feedback for rapid iteration early on. B2B requires integrations, lots of tangential work that doesn't build the core product.

They may actually have made the right decision - it got them to "time to pivot" without running out of cash.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#102

Streaming Chrome with some value adds must have been a short-term product right? It could only have existed until PCs caught up on processing speed (Apple's M1?). I wonder what vision did Suhail pitch to PG to deserve high praise. Because this can't be it.

> I wonder what vision did Suhail pitch to PG to deserve high praise. Because this can't be it

From what I've read, sounds like a thin client machine based on the web. Chromebooks but even thinner, relying on SSR. I think that's a plausible vision that could have driven the upfront costs of hardware down in return for a subscription.

Pithy vision - "a new type of web-centric computer"

Edit: I really liked following Mighty, and it's exactly the kind of speculative startup that you can respect and admire even when it doesn't work out. They didn't do anything wrong, they tried to make a useful valuable product but failed. A worthy endeavour.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#103

I wish Mighty had succeeded for a different audience. The core value prop "make figma faster" was not very compelling--people who need to use Figma can buy a mac. You know who does struggle with slow computers and memory issues? Call center employees who have to run Front, Slack, Chrome, and probably one or two other electron-based apps. At our startup (not in USA), these issues are so bad we've ended up getting peop…

> I wish Mighty had succeeded for a different audience.

Mighty wasn't the only game in town:

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/products/zero-trust/browser...

https://whist.com/

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#104
I was one of the people not only perplexed by the positioning, but that they managed to raise money. Props to Suhail for selling it - it does make me wonder how many great ideas are slipping through purely from VC's requiring flashy sales skills. But I guess that could be said about almost anything.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#105

While I never really believed in Mighty as a concept, I think the technology has enormous potential in some industries. A robust, performant and versatile VNC like toolkit to enable traditionally desktop software to be made available in the cloud could be be very successful. There are many CAD, Visualisation, Rendering, Editing, and Simulation tools that are incredible CPU, GPU or Memory intensive that could be made…

There is no technical challenge here. You can rent GPU instances from any cloud provider. Each of those has a built-in hardware video encoder. Then you can proceed to stream your CAD app/game/desktop/website over the browser with WebRTC. It's almost all OTC software. Stadia does it. Geforce Cloud does it.

There is no technological innovation left in this space. You can package it with a nice GUI and convenient user experience, but I feel like that's hardly a billion dollar startup idea.

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#106

I wish Mighty had succeeded for a different audience. The core value prop "make figma faster" was not very compelling--people who need to use Figma can buy a mac. You know who does struggle with slow computers and memory issues? Call center employees who have to run Front, Slack, Chrome, and probably one or two other electron-based apps. At our startup (not in USA), these issues are so bad we've ended up getting peop…

What would you be willing to pay for such a service? Would you consider a flat, per seat (user, not computer) per month pricing structure?

Also what apps do you want to run? Slack, Front, what else?

Re: Mighty Retrospective

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industry has been using Citrix in that problem space for nearly a decade. What does Mighty bring to the table?

I think it's more of a hybrid approach, the web renderer was running in the cloud, the ui was native and local. I beleve Citrix is mostly a standard VNC type product where everything is rendered on a server and streamed. I was envisaging a toolkit to enable you to build an app where parts of it run in cloud, parts of it locally. Think of a 3D cad tool, the ui could be all local, but the rendering and compute is in th…

You're misinformed. Citrix has plugins for managing aspects of GUI rendering, video/audio playback and GPU pipelines local on the client, which are a key part of the "secret sauce" behind their success in industry.[1] This is a product which is being used today for remote CAD/CAM workflows in the largest firms, whereas afaict applications of Mighty's product to this problem sphere is nothing but idle fantasy by HN posters?

1. ie. https://www.citrix.com/solutions/vdi-and-daas/hdx/what-is-hd... Whether they do these things well is another question entirely, but they've had more success than any of their competitors.

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