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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#111

Post by fuckstick »

oops wrote: post #85
baxtr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the vitamin vs painkiller discussion. The basic premise is: don’t build a vitamin, build a painkiller because it’s solves a real problem and people will be willing to pay for it. First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins. Second, the transition is not clear. It’s hard to draw a line line and say now this vitamin turned into a painkill…

I like the analogy. I never heard it before now, but I instantly understood what I think it meant: build something that is harder to live without. I have nothing to back this up but I’d think most people think of a vitamin as easier to live without than a painkiller. > For example: was Facebook a painkiller? Hardly. I don’t know. People without pain do take painkillers. And they can have a really hard time stopping.…

> I don’t know. People without pain do take painkillers. And they can have a really hard time stopping. In that sense, I would argue that Facebook is a lot like a painkiller for a lot of people!

Nice, you’ve explained by demonstration better than I could why this is a trash analogy and only confuses issues, does not clarify them. Consider stopping using it.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#112

Post by doorman2 »

Mighty had no hope of succeeding. I’ve built something very similar to Mighty, and the fact is that browsers are hogs, and then adding on video transcoding on top of that makes the situation completely untenable. If someone can’t afford a computer good enough to browse the web, they sure as hell can’t afford a computer that can transcode HD video at all times, which is essentially what they’d need to pay for.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#113

Post by ohgodplsno »

nisten wrote: post #29

I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too. Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only…

There was no point paying $30 a month _period_. You could get a cheap, refurbished 2014 laptop and it would still be a better value proposition than Mighty. The only potential buyers of this service are SV tech bros, not anyone living in the real life.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#115

Post by ohgodplsno »

ivoryloom wrote: post #2

I was skeptical about Mighty but seeing gaming platforms moving to streaming, PG endorsing this as the future, I thought I was just not getting it. Maybe I should trust myself more.

PG endorsing a technology is a sure way to know that it has no future.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#116

Post by fragmede »

anhncommenter25 wrote: post #95

Mighty was like compute arbitrage. The bet was that you could buy compute at cloud prices, resell it to end users, and since this is cheaper than buying consumer compute in the form of workstations, laptops, & tablets, you can pocket the difference. I can't think of a bigger slice of consumer compute than browser workload; so if the scheme doesn't work there, it won't work for anything. My conclusion is that compute…

I don't think it means services+arbitrage doesn't work. They were paying (I assume) cloud VM prices, and had to charge 20-30/month. If they had lower costs and were able to charge $5/month and still make money, we might not be having this conversation right now.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#117

Post by fuckstick »

mhss wrote: post #96
baxtr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the vitamin vs painkiller discussion. The basic premise is: don’t build a vitamin, build a painkiller because it’s solves a real problem and people will be willing to pay for it. First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins. Second, the transition is not clear. It’s hard to draw a line line and say now this vitamin turned into a painkill…

Analogies always fall apart somewhere under scrutiny. This one is still useful though to compare. Vitamins are successful because there’s a lot of awareness and marketing (sometimes deceitful) about the benefits of vitamins. If you’re going to build a vitamin product be prepared to spend a lot in marketing and/or have a killer user experience with tangible results to be able to rely on word of mouth.

> Analogies always fall apart somewhere under scrutiny.

Yeah but this one falls apart the moment you simply try to figure out what facet is trying to be conveyed. Just say what you fucking mean. The general painkiller > vitamin argument is generally bunk/false dichotomy - therefore you’re not saving any time with the analogy.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#118

Post by tomjen3 »

danpalmer wrote: post #58
robenkleene wrote: post #30

The trick of Figma claims another. I see Mighty as part of the broader trend of folks thinking Figma it the leading edge of a wider transition to web apps across all creative work. But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. I think what really happened is folks misinterpreted the s…

> But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. Media creation maybe, but I feel like professional software engineering might move soon. At the beginning of the year I moved from a company where I worked entirely locally, running a local stack, developing in a local editor, etc, to a…

VS code has the best remote features I have ever seen, good enough that I once got annoyed VS code had freezed just because the network died, then _realized I was doing the work over the network_. I hope it will stay a local app with powerful remote capabilities.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#119

Post by IceWreck »

Called it here back when it launched. Streaming video of a slightly more powerful browser in a browser (electron) never made sense to me.

And the few people who really had that usecase could just use a lightweight container running chromium + guacamole on a nearby server. Okay I'm sure Mighty used cool tech to make it faster than just that (idk how it worked but maybe they were transmitting changed HTML) but at its core the idea was not something normal people and 99% engineers would ever consider. Anyone rich enough to pay for it would just pay for a more powerful machine.

Anyways, they said they have 50% of VC money left and will be using it to create an online stable diffusion thingy which atleast fifteen startups are doing already including stability AI themselves. How can they differentiate ? Can they just use leftover VC money to make a completely different thing ?

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#120

Post by ryanyl »

obblekk wrote: post #57

Props to Suhail for building in the open (takes a lot of rejection tolerance) and being so honest about the path. That said, I work with lawyers as customers and I suspect there was an adjacent market in data privacy that a hosted browser would have had PM fit for. A lot of industries have strict legal requirements on controlling employee access to data (think healthcare, legal, compliance). In these cases, SaaS beco…

I think one of Mighty's competitors is pivoting and moving into that market (https://www.whist.com/)
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