91–100 of 107 posts
Mighty would have been huge imo if they just waited a bit longer and pivoted to powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR all day wear devices, like the upcoming Apple visor, where there are basically no resources available to be used for things like figma yet having a fast, scalable browser anywhere would be amazing.
* Pivoting towards enterprise. Not with speed in mind, but instead security/control/compliance.
We didn’t spend too much time here, so I can’t definitively say this wouldn’t have worked. Cloudflare had (has?) just this vision when they bought S2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is.... There is at least one critical roadblock that I see: wifi and networks can be spotty. If only 80% of a company’s employees have good enough internet, what do you do as an administrator? Force them to figure out notoriously difficult wifi problems? If you don’t, those that don’t like the browser will simply not use it because they’re not required to. Given this, I always thought of this as a secondary market. First, make something great, independent of being required to use the product. Then start building out other tools that make businesses more enticed. We did sell to companies in multi-seat deals, and were eager to keep pushing in this direction. Note the tag line: “A new browser to work faster”.
* CAD/Rendering/Simulation/etc instead of a Browser
The trend is that all of these are moving to the browser. However, maybe not fast enough and Mighty was too early. It’s also a more crowded market (Citrix, Teradici, now Parsec, etc) and yet smaller than the browser market (well, by users at least).
* Powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR
We never tried this. My sense is we’d be too early (at least 2+ years?).
* Accessibility, e.g. for screen readers
This was never a big enough priority but yeah, it seems solvable. It’s more or less another API to implement.
* Loading web pages faster is not going to make you more productive
As I see it, there are two buckets of speed. The first is to make fast things faster. The second is to make slow things faster. The two can work together. The real value prop is the second, but the first is where you can bring lots of delight. But I think there is some truth to this. Of the loyal paying users that we had, they felt substantially more productive. But could this benefit offset the price + downsides? Knowing what I know now, I don’t think so. But there’s a lot of context about what’s actually possible, what a wide spectrum of people value, etc that gets me to that conclusion.
* Who really, really, has a slow browser that’s willing to pay $35/month due to it?
This was my first thought when we starting working on a Browser. One thing I learned was to hold back my gut instinct and prove the answer, instead of guessing it. The empirical answer: thousands of people that we could find through minimal marketing (just Twitter, basically). Does that mean there are a million+ people out there that also have it? Maybe.. it’s hard to tell. But my personal hope was that this quantity generalized somewhat to the 2B users of Chrome so that we could at least make a profitable business. If we got there, we could move into areas where we were solving more problems.
So to directly answer the question: I’m pretty confident this market exists. But not if Mighty also has the downsides it did (doesn’t work well in cafes, a variety of bugs, etc.)
> RAM: Mighty allowed users to open hundreds of tabs without being worried that their RAM would be consumed. But my sense is this was not a killer feature. The benefit simply isn’t massive: the alternative is to close tabs and “clean things up”. Many people probably do this anyway because it’s visually hard to have hundreds of tabs open, so users end up closing tabs even with infinite RAM. This is evident in the data…
This person's claim that Mighty customers didn't open huge numbers of tabs and use a ton of RAM makes no sense. What OTHER purpose could a $35/m cloud browser possibly serve??
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The ultimate vision is/was to have everything run in the cloud. Imagine if you could run any app on the most powerful machine in the world. IMO the core paradigm shift that needs to happen is for the software and infrastructure to become commoditized. The only way for cloud-everything to not be a nightmarish abuse of the end-users is for the mode of operation to change, from the current "data comes to the app", int…
There needs to be some reason for users to chose to run their code. Maybe if self hosted software was somehow even cheaper than cloud software? Or maybe they hear about their friend/cousin getting their data stolen by hosting it in the cloud? Or maybe its so much faster hosted at home that the cloud can't compete. Or especially if its easier to store it yourself than it is to store it in the cloud somehow. I wonder i…
I always found the idea to be bizarre. The group of people for which a browser is truly horrendously slow would be on something like a low-end Windows laptop. From mid-end and upwards it's fine (or good enough) and for Mac users pretty much never an issue. The people with such crappy hardware are exactly the group to not be able to afford 35$ a month. That's like the price of 3 or 4 streaming services combined. Just…
Basically this product was a solution looking for a problem. The pricing is ridiculous of course. But I don't see how a lower price would have solved that problem. And the pricing was tied to them basically using very expensive VMs (16 cores, lots of RAM, GPU). And since they struggled with quality of service issues (i.e. it did not actually work that well), the whole thing was doomed. But even if it had worked, it would basically still be a solution looking for a problem.
I wish Mighty had succeeded for a different audience. The core value prop "make figma faster" was not very compelling--people who need to use Figma can buy a mac. You know who does struggle with slow computers and memory issues? Call center employees who have to run Front, Slack, Chrome, and probably one or two other electron-based apps. At our startup (not in USA), these issues are so bad we've ended up getting peop…
I'm not a fan of depreciation schedules and whatnot, but I don't think Everything as a Service is going to be the answer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reasonably priced PC laptops that can run Chrome and Electron do exist. Just don’t buy bottom of the barrel Celerons, instead target an i5 or a Ryzen 5 (or maybe a higher-end i3).
From my experience slow laptops are slow not because of the cpu (I mean, we’re not running a chess engine here…) but slow disks and slow/not enough RAM, which compounds the disk issue as soon as you start actively swapping… which in some of these is about as soon as the OS boots. Like, I just loaded up the Best Buy app and 3 of their top 10 selling laptops only have 4GB of RAM. I haven’t used a computer with that lit…
A previous employer had an anti-malware agent that made 2018-era NVME MBPros as slow as harddisks.
Streaming Chrome with some value adds must have been a short-term product right? It could only have existed until PCs caught up on processing speed (Apple's M1?). I wonder what vision did Suhail pitch to PG to deserve high praise. Because this can't be it.
just take the Sun marketing and sprinkle AAS.
Streaming Chrome with some value adds must have been a short-term product right? It could only have existed until PCs caught up on processing speed (Apple's M1?). I wonder what vision did Suhail pitch to PG to deserve high praise. Because this can't be it.
The ultimate vision is/was to have everything run in the cloud. Imagine if you could run any app on the most powerful machine in the world. See: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the... In my opinion, this is the right goal, but I don't think this can be done by running existing apps in the cloud (and remoting their UI). Instead, I think we need a new cloud-native platform so that any app can b…