I decided to stop working on Mighty • Hacker News Board

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#91

Post by iopq » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

kaesar14 wrote: post #79

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

100% - people cared about browser performance and usability until Firefox and Chrome solved 99% of the problems users would ever face (tabbing, consistent rendering, security, beauty(!)) and now it’s a market that’s immune to change.

Wait until adblockers stop working, and see many people start seeing YouTube ads again. Will they agree to stay on Chrome?

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#92

Post by hmate9 » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

Suhail’s Twitter is definitely worth a follow as he is regularly tweeting about the everyday problems and challenges of running a startup. If you’re interested in the space it’s a good mix of technical and startup challenges and is one of the few Twitter accounts that provides great content all the time (in my opinion)

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#93

Post by upbeat_general » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

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?

Hence why M1 killed them.

Some people do all their work in browsers.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#94

Post by dinvlad » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

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…

In the code space, would have to disagree I think, given how both JetBrains [1][2] and VS Code have embraced the client-server model, and how products like GitPod have used these to a full extent with excellent native integrations.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/

[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#95

Post by anhncommenter25 » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

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 arbitrage isn't viable for B2C. You will have to actually provide a service on top of the resale. For example Github Codespaces is reselling cloud compute while simultaneously solving infra-as-code pain points in the CI/CD pipeline.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#96

Post by mhss » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#97

Post by rideontime » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

hmate9 wrote: post #92

Suhail’s Twitter is definitely worth a follow as he is regularly tweeting about the everyday problems and challenges of running a startup. If you’re interested in the space it’s a good mix of technical and startup challenges and is one of the few Twitter accounts that provides great content all the time (in my opinion)

Eh, I couldn't stand all the cringe AI art tweets.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#98

Post by elvis10ten » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

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…

> My primary feeling is that I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser performance.

Where have you lived? Asking because “normal” varies a lot by geography.

> If anything, 98% of the time when I experience browser performance issues it's network-latency related

I guess if you are on HN, you wouldn’t be considered “normal”?

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#99

Post by dinvlad » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

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…

Meh, desktop Intel/AMD chips still beat M1, and are more versatile for gaming etc.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#100

Post by rstat1 » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

lukevp wrote: post #37

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.

Stadia failed too… but was that just google pulling the plug, or the whole concept that doesn’t make sense? Personally I’ve tried stadia and ps now, and they both have noticeable artifacting, lower resolution, and input latency, on a 1 gig symmetrical fiber connection. The only streaming that’s remotely acceptable as a gamer is steam in-home streaming over a hardwired connection.

I think Stadia failed because of a combo of reasons. Main 2 being: 1) Google. 2) Their pricing model made no sense.

Geforce NOW (NVIDIA's Stadia) works a lot better IMO, and doesn't require you go through them to acquire games. It lets you stream games you already have access to on say Steam or where ever.