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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#181

Post by smaudet »

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.

I don't consider it normal at all. Seems like the words of an out-of-touch upper cruster.

Most people make a 1k$ purchase last decades. Enthusiasts may be dropping 5-10k$ but not your average joe.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#182

Post by robenkleene »

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.

I don't disagree with that point as an idea. But I do disagree that that's the direction the market is going. E.g., we're here discussing a startup pivoting away from a bet on exactly the idea you're expressing here.

Today the onus is on people who still believe in that idea to express why they think Mighty failed (without falling into the well-worn "year of the desktop linux" trap).

Personally I don't care about the idea either way, I'm just looking at is where the market is going (e.g., how the market share of various software packages are trending). Ideas that sound good fail all the time in the market.

And so far, outside of Figma, the idea you're expressing looks to me like a failure? And personally, I've started to look at other things different about Figma that might have accounted for its success.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#183

Post by runako »

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…

> I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great.

Agree with this take. It's amazing he was able to get this funded at a time it was fairly obvious from their product roadmap and language that Apple was going to release ARM Macs. Props to him for the skill it took to get funding in the door.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#184

Post by mardifoufs »

dmarcos wrote: post #128
beebeepka wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only use for chromium is youtube. I only watch a handful of channels but things are getting ridiculous. Sometimes I get ads every minute. Every minute! Just the other day I got served 5 ads in a row after a simple fast forward. I gave up TV more than 20 years ago and this crap is way worse. What can I do without letting them in my actual browser? These people are crazy.

I highly recommend Youtube Premium. Also heard from creators that they get paid more from Premium views than from free accounts.

I pay for premium but still have to use vanced to avoid the sponsor segments that are in literally every video now. I totally understand why people wouldn't bother with premium until youtube offers a native sponsorblock-like alternative

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#185

Post by GordonS »

rvz wrote: post #4

It made no sense to begin with, had little to no use case and was full of hype by VCs [0] and had absolutely zero path to making any money. Doomed for failure from the start. [0] https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1511477714049388548

The most incredible thing about Mighty, for me, was that VCs bought into it. That... is just, wow.

I guess it goes to show that the idea is apparently only a small part of their decision making process - how it's sold to them is the bigger piece by far.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#186

Post by minimaxir »

morelisp wrote: post #64
landonxjames wrote: post #47

According to the final tweet in that thread [0] it seems like they are pivoting to a sort of AI generated art based social media platform. I’m curious why they think this has the potential to be a “mass market changing” business since the social media world seems pretty over saturated already [0] https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1591831193598963713

The last thing he already knew how to build didn't work, so he's going to try something else he already knows how to build. PMF? What's that?

There's definitely PMF for AI image tools...

...but that particular industry is moving so fast it's already homogenized (with the best and cheapest tools being made by the core AI developers themselves), so without extreme differentiation a new player can't compete.

The beta app in the Twitter thread has less features than current open-source AI Image tooling.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#187

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

danso wrote: post #152

Honestly one of the most "But why?" startup ideas I'd ever heard of. I figured pg's hype for it was based in thinking it could someday be targeted for profitable acquisition by Google. But perhaps the current tech industry downturn (plus Stadia's death) made that obviously untenable. At $30/month, this sounded like something that could only be worthwhile for businesses (though I'm at a loss to imagine what size/indus…

I think pg likes slightly naughty ideas. Didn't he famously want to program a server using instructions send over email? And this Mighty idea was quite naughty. Stream like Netflix but it is your whole browser. And also pg really hypes YC companies which, bless his heart, is what we all expect and why YC is such a beast.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#188

Post by polio »

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.

This is why general prediction markets need to continue to flourish. They're an antidote to bullshit. Also, ban the bettors that things wrong because they're probably just gambling addicts.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#189

Post by smaudet »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #162
Zopieux wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Picking screen metrics from 4-5 years ago is a pretty terrible, metric - I have maybe 14 screens but only 2 or 3 of them see active use or are hooked up to anything.

My oldest (working) devices are already all closing in on or past a decade. This metric is flawed in many ways...

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#190

Post by lmeyerov »

Good to see the pivot before cash ran out, but sad news :( Good luck to the team!

IMO Mighty is too early bc they didn't tackle the SW side, 'just' the remote nature, so couldn't get their 10X. The 10-100X shift today comes from apps running differently on cloud resources, not just lift-and-shift. That already exists as the VDI market.

Ex: We do client GPU cloud multi-GPU for cyber/fraud/etc analysts wanting to visually investigate how their many events stitch together, and Otoy does same for movie effects. In the consumer market, seeing same rewrites in say gaming. In a sense, Mighty's pivot to generative AI is the same -- faster to use remote multi-GPU services.. but custom built accelerated visual app for 100Xs, not lift-and-shift.

Without tackling the SW rewrite problem, hard for Mighty to get these wins via a lift-and-shift :( I do think federating cloud resources so users can bring their own and devs can reliably tap them would be amazing, but we seem still in the dev-controlled-server era. As someone trying to build predictable 100X experiences, that feels likely for awhile. Such a shift could have been webgl2 etc standards enabling modern multigpu apps in the browser... but Google and Apple web GPU browser/standards leadership have long strangled that path.

In a related note, we are starting to launch our global GPU edge network, and looking for a backend/infra eng on that + related AI services build out -- Nodejs/python/k8s. We are profitably growing: I agreed with Mighty's pattern before it even existed (my PhD at Berkeley explored it!), just easier ROI right now by sticking at the app layer.

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