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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#131

Post by Kiro »

aslilac wrote: post #59
modeless wrote: post #41

Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing tha…

yes! this is the same reason I’m glad Stadia died. “cool demo” does not equal “practical business”, and local compute will always be superior to cloud compute.

Stadia was amazing and worked great even for games that required semi-high latency. The problem was the business model.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#132

Post by ayewo »

baxtr wrote: post #61
talhof8 wrote: post #39

I don't think it's M1 that killed it. Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it. Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers. That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!

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…

Imagine the misery people went through for centuries prior to the discovery of pain killers. If you’ve ever had a tooth ache, I’m sure you can attest to the efficacy of pain killers as a medical invention. They are an enormously important piece in the quality of life that most of us enjoy today.

The vitamin vs pain killer metaphor is about building a company with a defensible business model.

So, the metaphor is about arriving at an honest answer to this question: would the “quality of life” of your first customer improve significantly if they switched to your product?

If you answer is no, you have two options:

1. either make changes to your product to make it more attractive to your target customers or;

2. keep the product as-is but change your positioning so that the product can be marketed to a different set of target customers to which the answer to the question is yes.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#133

Post by tpush »

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…

What's Figma got to with any of this? Figma is local compute just as much as any native app.

This is not about web vs. native but client-side vs. server-side rendering & compute.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#134

Post by lmeyerov »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #81
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…

> The standard solution is to limit the webapp to be accessible on VPN, and limit VPN to be accessible on MDM controlled devices, and limit MDM to be accessible on company owned devices. Didn't the "BeyondCorp" zero trust model pretty much kill that, or at least show there was a better way to restricting access to secure apps than a VPN?

And yet security VCs are investing here again and yeah, no idea why This Time Is Different

We do get VDI users for our tool in some high-end security sensitive places to work around weak clients (budget is not uniformly distributed across users), but that niche is a small market wrt VC..

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#136

Post by lkbm »

aniforprez wrote: post #80
paulgb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve talked to a couple of very loyal Mighty users. If you think about the number of hours a knowledge worker spends in the browser every month, it works out to a pretty small price per hour. It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.

I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?

> Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface?

Yes, probably, but I would note that a cheap M1 Mac is 4x the annual cost you cited for the browser, and if the browser is 95% of what you use a laptop for, getting the same perf boost for 25% the cost sounds like a good value prop.

Granted, a laptop should last more than a year, but presumably it starts to show it's age in under four, whereas the remote browser can improve over time.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#137

Post by csande17 »

MarkSweep wrote: post #66
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…

As evidence of a market for this, see the company Citrix. Also I think Facebook's content moderation website is only accessible from some sort of remote desktop system.

Funnily enough, the few times I've seen Citrix remote-desktop browsers used it's been for the opposite use case: isolating potentially malicious websites in a virtual machine so they can't compromise employees' computers.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#138

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67
modeless wrote: post #41

Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing tha…

My primary feeling is that I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser performance. I see it all the time on HN, e.g. people bitching about the amount of RAM Electron apps take and the like. Who cares? The average user certainly doesn't. If anything, 98% of the time when I experience browser performance issues it's network-latency related, o…

[deleted]

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#140

Post by [deleted] »

yrgulation wrote: post #55
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…

> Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a remote browser instance. Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?

[deleted]
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