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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#161

Post by stevenfabre »

ec109685 wrote: post #157
robenkleene wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the delta you're talking about is already gone. Figma is generally considered more performant with its WASM rendering approach than its desktop counterparts. But I don't think the let's say "other deltas" that are now keeping other high-powered apps from becoming web apps are moving at all. You can check my other comments in this thread for more details, but a specific point I'm making with the original comme…

Multiplayer is such a game changer that all editing tools will eventually feature that, so the Figma model is going to win. Once that is true, you want as many people to collaborate as possible and the browser is the perfect delivery model. Plus you ensure a consistent version across all clients.

Couldn’t agree more!

And liveblocks.io is here to make that happen at scale.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#162

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

Zopieux wrote: post #155
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product, "compute pixels on powerful machine -> render on thin client", makes much more sense if you don't try to monetize by being a cloud landlord, but you let the users own that powerful machine, make money through hardware, and help them with the software, make money through support, no subscriptions, no rent-seeking. Think at the level of a family: 2 parents, 2 children which means: 4 smartphones, 2÷3 laptop…

I find it deeply unsettling that you'd consider it normal/common to upgrade 4 digit (is that all Apple?) devices every 2 years, or that folks would need so many different form factors in the first place. Just thinking of the literal mountains of ewaste gives me goosebumps.

It's pretty much what happens in the regular household with median and around income [1] [2].

Yes, we are currently generating way beyond ridiculous levels of waste, electronic and beyond: we throw away globally 1.4 billion tons of food per year [3] in a world with 822 million people suffering from undernourishment [4]. If we are this bad with something as vital as food, of course we are worse with devices.

[1] (2017) Average U.S. household now has 7 screens, report finds https://www.fiercevideo.com/cable/average-u-s-household-now-...

[2] (2019) U.S. Households Have an Average of 11 Connected Devices — And 5G Should Push That Even Higher https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/u-s-households-have-an...

[3] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america

[4] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty...

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#163

Post by jacurtis »

fragmede wrote: post #116
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.

Services+Arbitrage definitely works. But Mighty didn't solve a painful-enough pain point.

The arbitrage was how Mighty made money (buy a cloud VM for $10/mo and sell it for $20 with a software wrapper).

But customers need a reason to pay for it. The advantages that Mighty offered weren't significant enough to impact most people. If they did, the advantages gained were questionable IMHO. Forcing people into a whole new workflow to slightly improve client-side JS performance is probably a worse trade-off for the vast majority of people even if you ignore cost entirely. Only a small group of people are encountering this pain point enough to actually seek out a solution for it. Once that small group of people find your solution, then you have to convince them to pay $20-30 a month to remove it. People are already canceling $12/mo Netflix subscriptions. To pay double-that for better JS rendering is a tough sale.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#164

Post by kyleyeats »

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…

Framerate, response time and loading times are all very important to the user. But yeah loading times are a distant third.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#166

Post by stephc_int13 »

Suhail blocked me on Twitter some time ago as I was a bit vocal in my opposition to the core idea behind this app.

I think it was already dead at the time and the criticism got under his skin.

I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas. I think I could easily fund a few companies by doing that on weekends.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#168

Post by jacurtis »

doorman2 wrote: post #112

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.

This was EXACTLY the problem Mighty was encountering.

They were targeting customers who didn't have powerful enough computers and offering a way to make their computer effectively faster while browsing the web without needing to upgrade their computer.

The problem is the solution costs $35/mo. That's $420 a year.

Anyone who can afford an extra $420 a year to improve their computer speed, probably is just going to buy a better computer with that money.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#169

Post by runako »

Kwpolska wrote: post #40
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…

> use your old laptop > M1 To have a M1 chip, you need a new laptop. A new Intel/AMD laptop would bring you plenty performance not to require remote desktop as a service.

For Mighty, this would mean their addressable market shrinks every year as more people replace with computers that are faster. That's not the characteristic of a market most startups want to be in.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#170

Post by GordonS »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #166

Suhail blocked me on Twitter some time ago as I was a bit vocal in my opposition to the core idea behind this app. I think it was already dead at the time and the criticism got under his skin. I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas. I think I could easily fund a few companies by doing that on weekends.

> I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas

That's a great idea for a startup, VCs would be falling over themselves for a piece!

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