> Having new ideas is a lonely business
Crazy New Ideas
21–30 of 808 posts
Re: Crazy New Ideas
#22Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
From what I understand of both the recent tweets and both of their fairly radical/extreme (and mostly correct) views about abstraction being a net negative, the criticism is less "Mighty doesn't work" and more "We shouldn't need to use an app like Mighty to get good performance on a basic website".
Sure, but the disconnect seems to be that Mighty is advertised for people who essentially use their browser as an OS (I see Figma mentioned a lot), rather than people who just want to do basic browsing.
I think Mighty has unfairly taken the brunt of a lot of growing discontent with bloat on the web. I'm not ready to fork over $30+ for faster browsing, but I'm glad someone is working in this space, because I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a step in that direction.
Re: Crazy New Ideas
#23"Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they do. I think if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead."
That's the VC business model in a nutshell
Re: Crazy New Ideas
#24Isn’t this pretty much what Thomas Kuhn said in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions back in the 60s? At one time that was hailed as one of the most important books of the 20th century.
Re: Crazy New Ideas
#25Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
Mighty is a good idea, marketed to the wrong people. I mean, who wouldn't just upgrade their computer? New software is a cost, even if it's "free." I'm sure there's a niche, though. Like low-paid workers needing to do a lot on their crappy personal machines.
I think that corporations may want to force all their users to use Mighty so that they can control exactly what goes on in the browser -- it is easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious extensions.
Maybe even prevent browsers from downloading files onto the local computer. A full recording of each user's sessions. Integrated password manager that uses the Mighty login to tie them all together.
So I view it as valuable to corporations and thus mighty falls into the B2B category of company which makes software end users hate, but corporations love.
Probably a fair bit of money in that.
Re: Crazy New Ideas
#26In the realm of entrepreneurship, I think domain experts who also risk tons of their cash on crazy ideas should be looked at even closer. Y Combinator and Tesla were seen as stupid and crazy for a long time. Meanwhile I’ve seen a lot of domain expert entrepreneurs do really crazy things that lead nowhere when it’s VC money instead of theirs.
There are too many factors that'll decide whether it'll be success or not. I believe timings and luck are often overlooked.
iPhone certainly not the first touch screen display, Microsoft did have one, I believe. However Apple's timing was perfect, there was increasing adaptation of wifi connectivity and 3g, making it able to browse anywhere. Of course smoother interface and beautiful design also contribute big.
AmongUs was lucky they got advertisement from streamer, at perfect timing that was (is) pandemic and lockdowns.
Tesla can be considered crazy because they try to emerge with unknown product, with unknown market and unknown possibility of success. If we look at the past, Apple's iPhone was crazy too, because it was new product, with unknown market.
Re: Crazy New Ideas
#27Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
There was this product[1] to browse internet offline by downloading something called “Web Packs”. This was back in 2005 just when I was graduating when I spoke to the founding team. They were naturally quite confident about the product taking off. Something seemed off to me I couldn’t point out what so I didn’t take the job offer. After all these years I realized the source my discomfort. They were actually betting against the speed of internet getting better. While most of the businesses like Amazon, Google were betting for the internet tech to improve this product did exactly the opposite.
To me Mighty sounds like a similar category of product. They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on. Exactly when Apple has launched M1, which blows the previous version out of the water, at a non crazy price. From this point it’s a matter of time other hardware also catches up in terms of performance and price.
Besides, yet another company to handover my entire browsing history and data for purported improvement in latency? I don’t know.
Re: Crazy New Ideas
#28"If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous" - my reaction would be to ask: that's unexpected to me, what is different?
Re: Crazy New Ideas
#29I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box.
Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com didn't invent Tinder. It's often the curious outsiders that disrupt the status quo, not the well connected insiders.
Re: Crazy New Ideas
#30Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
We have game streaming services from NVIDIA and amazon has had Amazon workspaces. With the global chip shortage which will affect a large amount of people I think that this would be the best time to prove your product to have a good effect.
Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation.