[HN Gopher] I decided to stop working on Mighty
___________________________________________________________________
I decided to stop working on Mighty
Author : chidiw
Score : 185 points
Date : 2022-11-13 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| mbStavola wrote:
| I never understood the value proposition here, but I assume they
| had _some_ traction which motivated them to work on this for
| almost four years. Curious as to their numbers and what people
| walked away thinking after trying it.
| bombcar wrote:
| In a world where phone CPUs weren't as powerful as laptop CPUs
| it might have made sense.
| danso wrote:
| 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/industry of company would want this). Did Might have any
| corporate clients, and if so, how did they navigate the
| security/privacy compliance issues?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| There's no indication that cloud gaming is declining.
|
| Xbox Cloud, Playstation, Nvidia Geforce, Shadow (even has
| streaming VR), Amazon Luna, Paperspace, Boosteroid, etc etc.
| There's no shortage of options.
|
| Google shutting down a business isn't a good indicator of a
| market's validity.
|
| The "Buy why?" was simple: it made the internet very fast and
| improved battery life of laptops.
| cowtools wrote:
| latency
| abetusk wrote:
| In my opinion, on the face of it, remote experiences like this,
| be it gaming or whatever, are not out of the realm of reason. In
| practice, they tend to not work (again, in my opinion) because
| the rate at which computers get faster and cheaper far outpaces
| the infrastructure necessary to make a these "fly by wire"
| solutions work or have them be adopted.
|
| If Moore's law (or it's equivalent in compute/dollar) really ever
| does level out, then this will become more attractive. With the
| cost of compute dropping exponentially, it doesn't seem like this
| can ever really get a foothold.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I was a paid user, so I guess I'll chime in from that point of
| view. Why did I pay for this?
|
| On my work computer, I keep everything separate. Chrome is work
| stuff. Mighty was my personal stuff, with little to no files
| stored locally. When I run all the docker containers to stand up
| the local server. My computer is very taxed for resources. Mighty
| was amazing and not bogging down my computer with a second
| browser open.
|
| However, on my big beefy personal M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64 GB
| of ram. It actually felt slow. I found myself reaching for
| regular Chrome more and more.
|
| Very niche use case. IMO they needed to pivot to B2B and not some
| niche B2C play, like what they were pursuing.
|
| Overall, it worked impressively so. Kudos to the team for
| shipping something so stable that worked.
| andybak wrote:
| For the benefit of others who don't have a clue what mighty is:
| https://www.mightyapp.com/
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Thank you
| modeless wrote:
| 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 that happens on the client the better.
| Clients are (at least sometimes) under user control. When stuff
| moves to the cloud users give up control and that's a bad thing.
| Long live fat clients!
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1588906086459150337?s=20&t...
| aslilac wrote:
| yes! this is the same reason I'm glad Stadia died. "cool demo"
| does not equal "practical business", and local compute will
| always be superior to cloud compute.
| andrewvc wrote:
| What? Stadia worked great (I say this as a user). What didn't
| work was the business model, the lack of games, and the lack
| of trust in google to invest to fix those other things.
|
| It worked flawlessly for me for years over Wi-Fi. GeForce now
| which I currently use is rockier due to being more bandwidth
| sensitive and not as controller friendly since you're really
| using a PC, not a console as stadia was.
| liuliu wrote:
| "always" is not given. But yes, glad more computing on
| clients. More power to the people.
| Kiro wrote:
| Stadia was amazing and worked great even for games that
| required semi-high latency. The problem was the business
| model.
| smaudet wrote:
| Agree with co-commenter, I have never seen anyone who used
| it for low latency apps say it was sufficient. The target
| market for displacing e.g. gpus is heavily geared towards
| low latency.
|
| It might have been OK for mobile games, but then they were
| just competing with themselves, with an arguably inferior
| product (if I can't play my mobile game anywhere, only in
| the vicinity of my house where I already have my high
| powered rig, what's the point?)
|
| I do think it was an attempt to defeat a very legit,
| widespread use case to try tk justify pushing thin clients
| on everyone, glad it failed.
| bloody-crow wrote:
| Even under ideal conditions where most people were claiming
| it's working great, I never found the latency even remotely
| acceptable. Maybe it's due to my preference to esports
| titles that requires all the responsiveness possible, but
| the point stands. Remote rendering would never be able to
| achieve anything even close to acceptable performance to be
| competitive with on-client rendering.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| 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 laptops, 1/2 desktops, 1/2 tablets,
| each of them $1,000+ which means around $8,000+ and $11,000+,
| replaced every 2/4 years. Instead of 8/11 screens, each with
| it's own beefy CPU/GPU/RAM, you could have 8/11 thin clients
| (at the most $200 each, for fancy cameras and larger batteries)
| and a powerful machine, somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000,
| dual CPU, dual GPU, etc., which can last 10+ years (thinking of
| all those refurbished servers with 2012 Xeon E5-2620s which
| work great even today, and have no reason not to work perfectly
| fine even in 2032).
|
| Bandwidth/latency is an issue but as we are advancing in 5G+
| technologies it's just a wait game.
|
| Long live thin clients where the user _owns_ the upgradeable
| fat server rendering the thin client!
| Zopieux wrote:
| I find it deeply unsettling that you'd consider it
| normal/common to upgrade 4 digit (is that all Apple?) devices
| every 2 years, or that folks would need so many different
| form factors in the first place.
|
| Just thinking of the literal mountains of ewaste gives me
| goosebumps.
| bombcar wrote:
| Most people who upgrade on a cycle also sell on a cycle -
| if you buy the new hotness today, and sell it in two years,
| it'll still be relatively hot. The old one isn't thrown
| away, it's just sold to someone else.
|
| People do it with cars (even if they're not leasing, which
| is _explicitly_ doing it).
| smaudet wrote:
| I don't consider it normal at all. Seems like the words of
| an out-of-touch upper cruster.
|
| Most people make a 1k$ purchase last decades. Enthusiasts
| may be dropping 5-10k$ but not your average joe.
| robocat wrote:
| WTF? Mostly you can't even use consumer technology from
| "decades" ago - it's incompatible.
|
| In 2005 the average size of a TV was 30 inches. Two
| decades ago a TV had no HDMI, and it only received analog
| NTSC or PAL.
|
| A phone was 2G - 3G was the thing about to be but mostly
| not there yet. One decade ago the iPhone 5 was released.
|
| An Apple iBook cost $1200 with 128MB of ram and a PPC
| processor: https://apple-history.com/ibook_mid_2002
|
| Maybe a stereo is usable - although for midrange
| equipment the capacitors have probably dried out and you
| certainly won't be getting digital FM.
|
| You would need to be very poor if you can't get working
| hand-me-downs from a decade ago.
| [deleted]
| PebblesRox wrote:
| And even among households that do have so many devices,
| aren't the kids' devices typically "replaced" with hand-me-
| downs from the grownups rather than with totally brand-new
| devices?
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| 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...
| smaudet wrote:
| 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...
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| "Adults spend $1,200 a year on consumer electronics and
| own, on average, 25 CE products per household, according
| to a study by the CEA." [1] In a family of 4 [2], this
| can mean somewhere around $3/4,000 per year, or $6/8,000
| every 2 years.
|
| [1] https://www.cnet.com/culture/study-u-s-adults-
| spend-1200-a-y...
|
| [2] The average US family size is 2.51 [3] while average
| worldwide is 4.9 [4]
|
| [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-
| size-of-h...
|
| [3] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
| tank/2020/03/31/with-billio...
| smaudet wrote:
| "electronic gizmos" is not screens...
|
| I can think of quite a few electronics I spent money this
| year which did not include any screen device. Again,
| these stats are misleading, maybe dishonest.
|
| My "device" budget we'll call it has been less than 1000$
| over the past 5 years, and that is with spending a fair
| amount on non-screen decives, which are electronic in
| nature but not investments in dedicated computing like
| you would have us beleive.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| "Consumer electronics" consist of "telephones,
| televisions, and calculators, then audio and video
| recorders and players, game consoles, mobile phones,
| personal computers and MP3 players", "GPS, automotive
| electronics (car stereos), video game consoles,
| electronic musical instruments (e.g., synthesizer
| keyboards), karaoke machines, digital cameras, and video
| players", "smart light fixtures and appliances, digital
| cameras, camcorders, cell phones, and smartphones",
| "virtual reality head-mounted display goggles, smart home
| devices that connect home devices to the Internet,
| streaming devices, and wearable technology." [1] Most of
| them have screens.
|
| As a general heuristic, one single person's decision tree
| is rather irrelevant in the long open game of average
| spending behaviours.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_electronics
| modeless wrote:
| I think something like this could make sense as a place to
| run large machine learning models locally. I don't need a
| server to run my browser or my apps, they run just fine
| locally. But a server to run large language models, Stable
| Diffusion, Whisper voice recognition, etc would be useful, as
| these types of models can run _much_ faster at higher quality
| on a beefy GPU than they ever will on a phone.
|
| The endgame of these models is an agent that knows
| practically everything about me and can perform tasks on my
| behalf, which I would really prefer to live in my house
| running on hardware I own, rather than in a data center under
| someone else's control.
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| That character is what I'd use for"x divided by y". Is it
| common use somewhere to use it for "between x and y
| inclusive"
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| The obelus, / [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelus
| renewiltord wrote:
| I see, this is a novel use you have settled on. Thanks
| for naming the symbol for me.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| With this specific meaning of "range between"/"closed
| interval" it is often used in Eastern European
| italo-/franco-phone languages/texts. A short history of
| obelus on StackExchange [1].
|
| [1] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/9530
| smaudet wrote:
| Your own link states that this is primarily a division
| symbol, hard to take this seriously...
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| "It also has other uses in a variety of specialist
| contexts." [1] Language is complex and signs often have
| more than one signification, but one must have curiosity
| and endeavour beyond what stands prima facie.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelus#:~:text=It%20als
| o%20has....
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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, or the fact
| that some page is loading 300 ad-tracking scripts and one of
| them is accidentally blocking. The only time I really notice
| client-side execution performance is when someone posts a cool
| 3D browser example on HN and things slightly slow down a bit on
| my phone when there are a couple million polygons or whatever.
| Even then, things are fine on my laptop.
| Beldin wrote:
| 98% of performance problems on my machine are traceable to a
| crappy Electron video communication app (skype) eating 4
| cores and still having hiccups galore. Switching to a
| different app usually fixes the issue.
|
| I'm pretty sure the average user cares about "hey this app
| sucks, but this other app gives me the same functionality
| without issue".
|
| You can hope they never discover other apps for work-from-
| home, but frankly, if that's your business model, you're
| doing it wrong.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| 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.
| iopq wrote:
| Wait until adblockers stop working, and see many people
| start seeing YouTube ads again. Will they agree to stay on
| Chrome?
| beebeepka wrote:
| 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.
| dmarcos wrote:
| I highly recommend Youtube Premium. Also heard from
| creators that they get paid more from Premium views than
| from free accounts.
| jon-wood wrote:
| This, as much as people may moan, is the answer. Either
| that or go subscribe to Nebula or whatever not-YouTube
| platform your favourite YouTube channels are publishing
| to.
|
| Content production costs money, in some cases vast
| amounts of it, and while advertising is a terrible
| solution to that just not paying is an even worse one. If
| everyone blocks ads then nobody gets paid, and nothing
| gets produced.
| smaudet wrote:
| Its not just about moaning, it's about paying it forward.
| I'm not sure when people decided everything should be
| free - under a certain income sure we should be
| subsidized, paying for things is a way of voting for the
| way you want to see the world.
|
| If you don't pay you don't have a choice. "Not using" is
| not enough, because you still need to support what you do
| use.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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
| bitwize wrote:
| "Your contract with the network when you get the show is
| you're going to watch the spots."
| sefrost wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is true because there are many many many
| examples where improving client performance increases
| conversion in e-commerce sites.
|
| https://web.dev/rakuten/
| wellareyousure wrote:
| [deleted]
| smaudet wrote:
| "I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain
| that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser
| performance."
|
| Eh I think technical sales people overestimate how much users
| don't care, the feeling of "normal" users don't care is
| primarily driven by a narrow age bracket of folks who haven't
| had enough time to form an opinion (ages 20-25).
|
| As this age bracket thinks of itself as "normal" and tends to
| live in its own bubble, it dismisses the general distaste for
| technology as being "not technological", when in fact the
| older generations already have expectations which it
| recognizes that technology is getting worse, not better.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| Framerate, response time and loading times are all very
| important to the user. But yeah loading times are a distant
| third.
| bitwize wrote:
| People complained about the amount of RAM NeWS apps took up,
| too. In retrospect we realized NeWS was a missed opportunity
| to revolutionize networked-app UI.
|
| Electron is the dream of NeWS for current-era hardware and
| software. In the future we won't even blink at the space it
| takes up.
| elvis10ten wrote:
| > 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"?
| modeless wrote:
| I think this is true in one sense and false in another. It's
| true because users often don't complain or even consciously
| notice poor performance. So if you are trying to sell a
| product, advertising performance benefits doesn't work well.
| People don't _think_ they care. But it 's false because
| performance actually has enormous and easily measurable
| effects on user behavior. So if you care about providing
| value, then performance is one of the most important things,
| and it's consistently overlooked because it doesn't sell.
| no_time wrote:
| >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.
|
| It is our job to care so non IT people don't have to.
| Entinel wrote:
| To a degree yes but acting like anything that uses <500MB
| of RAM is a disaster goes beyond what is a reasonable
| concern in my opinion.
| gnabgib wrote:
| I think you got your greater than sign the wrong way
| around? Consider a lot of non-tech people don't
| constantly upgrade, and still rock 4GB systems, at least
| an eighth of that resource is a big ask for a sloppy app
| (unless it is the only app they use on the device).
| smaudet wrote:
| A 1GB system should be sufficient, and apps should be
| less than 100MB.
|
| For games etc yes 32GB+ is fine but we went the wrong way
| thinking what we have is acceptable.
| Entinel wrote:
| Yeah my sign is the wrong way. My bad.
| ianbutler wrote:
| I don't think Mighty was unreasonable, just tackled from the
| wrong end. Netlify and Vercel did it from the other end and look
| where they are right now.
|
| Instead of a faster browser they did super easy edge deployments
| of your JS apps which has a similar end result for users but also
| solves a giant headache for businesses which is where the money
| is.
| yubiox wrote:
| Is there anything like this that I can run myself? My phone does
| not load some pages well and I would like to browser stream from
| my own server.
| ceres wrote:
| I think kasmweb (kasmweb.com) has this. They claim it's open
| source but I think it's more "source available"
| rvz wrote:
| 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
| GordonS wrote:
| 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.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I wonder if there's some sort of implicit "you hype my
| product and I'll hype yours" deal that these people have.
| funstuff007 wrote:
| > I love how friendly Replit and MIghty are to one another. One
| day they will divide the world between them.
|
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1357097710734749700?lang=en
|
| I dig when billionaires are wrong. They're just like us. :)
| memish wrote:
| Good pivot and a humbling reminder for us all. Jonathan Blow on
| the day this was announced, "Very hard to describe how
| embarrassing this is for everyone involved in the Web and, sort
| of, software more generally."
|
| https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387094702139142145
|
| > Wait, Paul Graham supported this?
|
| Jonathan: Very vocally, to the point of insulting world-class
| programmers who think it's dumb (he did not know said programmers
| were world-class).
|
| > Huh, I see. I thought he's all pro elegant and lean solutions,
| judging by the books and articles at least.
|
| Jonathan: Yeah it doesn't make sense to me either.
| raverbashing wrote:
| And of course he was right: "My hope is that what makes this
| temporary is that it will not actually work better than most
| peoples' laptops."
|
| https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387121451187118080
| Dreako wrote:
| This happens to literally every startup tho
| modeless wrote:
| With different people each time. And some of the people are
| on the correct side more often than others. It's useful to
| check afterward and update your priors on who you should be
| listening to.
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Hmm, I'm not quite sure how to interpret Jonathan Blow's tweet.
| You seem to be saying that he is saying that _the Mighty
| project itself_ is embarrassing, while I took it to mean the
| fact that today 's beefy computers, with all their CPU and RAM,
| struggle to render web pages to the point that someone is
| considering doing a rube-goldberg-esque solution of rendering
| on a mainframe-equivalent and then streaming you the results is
| the part that's embarrassing.
| modeless wrote:
| Yes, and from that perspective the fact that it didn't work
| and nobody actually wanted it seems to indicate that it
| shouldn't have been embarrassing after all.
| _sohan wrote:
| I was surprised that PG supported this idea so publicly for so
| long. Best of luck for the team on their next product.
| [deleted]
| stavros wrote:
| Can someone explain what Mighty is? There's no context either
| here or in the linked Twitter thread.
|
| After significant searching, I found it:
|
| https://www.mightyapp.com
|
| Basically Stadia for webpages.
| secondcoming wrote:
| I'm still stumped. It seems like a cloud-based browser?
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, it looks like it streams the rendered pages as video
| from a server?
| rightbyte wrote:
| A X11-server in some crappy video fallback mode?
| ayewo wrote:
| To better understand Mighty and their business model, start
| with this heavily debated post about them from 2021:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215
| landonxjames wrote:
| 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
| Dreako wrote:
| it's not ai generated "social media"
|
| The social aspect was just added as an extra feature
|
| It's more like a Photoshop + canva type project
| bombcar wrote:
| A cynical take would be something doused in enough buzzwords to
| prevent the VCs asking for the half of the money that remains
| back.
| rikroots wrote:
| He says in his 4th tweet in the thread "I think there's a large
| opportunity to make an experience using many advances in AI
| (not just diffusion) to make a new kind of Creative Suite. A
| different set of products with a brand new UX." He links to the
| prototype at the end of the thread - https://playgroundai.com/
|
| The current site doesn't look very inspiring. Like you say,
| just another "AI generated art based social media platform".
| But if his plans are to develop it into some sort of After
| Effects competitor then ... maybe that's a market opportunity
| worth cracking?
| morelisp wrote:
| 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?
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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.
| doorman2 wrote:
| 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.
| jacurtis wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fareesh wrote:
| I was always quite skeptical of this being a popular use-case
| that grows over time.
|
| Can the underlying technology be used to create a first class
| remote desktop experience? From the ones I've tried, I've found
| that NoMachine is among the best performing remote desktop tools.
| I never used Mighty but my guess is they must have achieved
| better performance than this? Was Mighty's technology tailored to
| Chrome only?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| In May 2021 Paul Graham wrote _Crazy New Ideas_ [1], in which he
| explained that envy is the only reason people criticize ideas by
| "reasonable domain experts". This was widely understood at the
| time to refer to critics of Mighty[2][3].
|
| [1]: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062713
|
| [3]: https://www.echevarria.io/blog/the-mighty-pushback-isnt-
| all-...
| roflyear wrote:
| I know to exist in the VC world you have to buy into insane
| shit and convince yourself you believe it is the next best
| thing, but this just seems so ludicrous to me. I don't
| understand it at all.
| II2II wrote:
| We live in a world of stuff that was once viewed as insane
| shit, yet ended up to be the next best thing. Sometimes the
| stuff was insane shit at the time, the technology failed
| because it could not be ready at the time, yet we still ended
| up with something useful in the long run.
|
| None of this is to say that all of those crazy ideas, or even
| any given crazy idea, will work out in the long run. The
| thing is, we cannot know until that time has come and gone.
| ahMath8 wrote:
| People with enough money sit and imagine all day tend to
| develop delusions of grandeur; see the various flavors of
| tribal wise men in history.
|
| Not so bad in and of itself, it's when individual's delusions
| of self worth infect others and drag us along with.
|
| Daily work should focus on tending to human biological needs
| and telling the delusional to mumble their gibberish in a
| corner aside from that.
|
| I feel zero obligation to validate PG or Musk or the rest.
| Just people. Each one of billions. Their figurative
| identities as wealthy members of society is due to conformity
| to politically correct spoken tradition, not an indication
| they're almighty.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| "the difficulty with finding truly transformative, great
| ideas is that they look pretty similar to bad ideas in the
| early stages" is one of pg's central theses that I couldn't
| disagree with more strongly, and the only conclusion I can
| come to is that pg's hubris is blinding him.
|
| I don't think it's so much that you can't tell the difference
| between crazy bad and crazy good ideas in the early stages,
| it's that you're asking the wrong people. pg loves to quote
| the mythos that AirBnB was such a "crazy" idea early on that
| big VCs couldn't see the potential. But even in the early
| years, I don't think AirBnB was a big leap at all.
| Couchsurfing was already big, and platforms like
| HomeAway/VRBO had received huge funding rounds. pg was just
| asking the wrong VCs - not surprising that a bunch of rich
| old guys would be put off staying in someone's guestroom.
| Indeed, my understanding is that the first investor to really
| see value in AirBnB was very familiar with the vacation
| rental space.
|
| In my opinion, the startups that were wildly successful
| weren't so much because they had "out there" ideas, but
| because their execution was unparalleled. Dropbox, Stripe,
| Figma, AirBnB, etc. just came out with products that were a
| delight to use when you first tried them in ways their
| competitors weren't.
|
| Trying to be introspective, I think the event that most
| surprised me and seemed "crazy" was the election of Donald
| Trump in 2016. But again, I think i was just asking the wrong
| people. My circle of college-educated urbanites was basically
| unaware of the depth of some of the discontent with the
| status quo that Trump tapped into.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| agreed, but on AirBnB, AirBnB was huge because it was
| cheaper than a hotel, they could ignore zoning laws, and it
| was meant to be for more personal & honest experiences.
| it's now far more expensive than a hotel, governments are
| restricting AirBnB subletting after complaints now, and the
| experiences are far more sterile with scams more common.
|
| the complaints from the peanut gallery was always "this
| will work until it doesn't anymore", just like Uber, and
| that's exactly what's happening, it's crashing down now.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I can't imagine how full of themselves one must be to think
| that because they're a subject matter expert they cannot have
| bad ideas.
| [deleted]
| hmate9 wrote:
| 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)
| renewiltord wrote:
| I actually had him muted for what seemed to me him constantly
| trying to self aggrandize.
| philshem wrote:
| On the other hand,...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067820
| rideontime wrote:
| Eh, I couldn't stand all the cringe AI art tweets.
| userabchn wrote:
| Although I follow him, I get such a feeling of arrogance from
| his tweets (similar to the Repl.it guy) that, although the
| failure of a startup is sad, I can't help feeling some
| satisfaction from this development (also partly from the
| vindication as I was certain that this wouldn't work as soon as
| it was announced).
| xwowsersx wrote:
| What is Mighty?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I _think_ the product in question is this:
| https://www.mightyapp.com/
|
| It's basically Google Stadia for web browsers; do the
| computation and renderning in a far-away data center and stream
| the result as a video feed to a local thin client program. I
| suppose this is an idea that could work better for web browsers
| than video games, but modern web browsers and
| sites/"applications" require fewer resources than modern AAA
| video games by at least a tiny margin and the pricing just
| wasn't competitive.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Oh thank you. Given the discussion here, that has to be it.
| Thanks!
| SergeAx wrote:
| I am very skeptical by my nature, and see it more as a negative
| trait. But there are moments when I want to shout from the top of
| my lungs: "Who in their right mind gonna use it, not talking
| about buying it?!". I remember two such cases: that voice rooms
| app, where people gathered and talked about themselves and of
| course crypto tokens, and this remotely running browser for
| $30/month.
|
| I beleive, by the way, that the idea of a fast browser for cheap
| devices came to founder after reading story about Browserling, QA
| multibrowser suite, going viral in India, where people with $20
| phones were able to use WhatsApp webapp via Browserling free plan
| (HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103235).
| Coincidentially, I heard that voice room app (I am not being
| sarcastic here, I really forgot it's name and don't think it's
| worth googling) also became succesfull in India.
| arriu wrote:
| Putting market fit aside, Mighty was a technical feat coming from
| a talented team.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| 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.
| langitbiru wrote:
| His new venture: https://playgroundai.com/
|
| Src: https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1591831193598963713
| aslilac wrote:
| oh lovely, a big titty generator. how useful.
| Dreako wrote:
| have you even used it? Why are people here acting more and
| more like reddit users
|
| Insufferable
| ykl wrote:
| I think this piece from a few years ago about how difficult it is
| to build a startup around GPT-3 [1] is relevant to the AI art
| product they're pivoting to. Best of luck to them, but the "build
| a product on top of open source AI models" space overwhelming
| favors the incumbents that actually are doing the cutting edge
| work in driving those models.
|
| [1] https://www.allencheng.com/starting-a-business-around-
| gpt-3-...
| pavlov wrote:
| Some 5-6 years ago I built a live streaming backend that used a
| custom C++ encoding front around Chromium on GPU servers on AWS.
| Mighty probably does something pretty similar. It was the right
| solution for our users at that moment because our product was a
| professional tool at a relatively high price tag, and being able
| to run full HTML+CSS allowed us to deliver customized motion
| graphics quickly using available designer talent, so there was a
| distinct advantage there.
|
| It was also quite expensive to run, and the stack was fickle
| because those Nvidia GPU servers aren't designed to run client
| apps -- they're AI/ML solutions primarily. So I'm not surprised
| that Mighty is shutting down: the infra bills must have been
| running pretty hot and they seem to believe they can better spend
| their cash runway on AI, presumably on largely the same infra.
|
| (Btw I'm giving a talk at the Kranky Geek virtual event on
| Thursday Nov 17 about cloud compositing which will discuss this
| Chromium adventure and what I believe is a better solution for
| most apps.)
| ivoryloom wrote:
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| broken clock is right twice a day. being skeptical on 100% of
| startups makes you right 90% of the time but doesnt by itself
| prove you have good judgment yet. you also need to know how to
| be nonconsensus and optimistic.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| PG endorsing a technology is a sure way to know that it has no
| future.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Yeah it's almost like people are collectively waking up to
| the fact that VCs are not actually that smart because their
| whole business model is predicated on being wrong 90+% of the
| time (which to be fair they've been explicitly saying
| forever). Now they're connecting the dots and realizing that
| the other 10% are just luck (and a well timed bull market).
| lukevp wrote:
| 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.
| rstat1 wrote:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You probably need some post-rendering to speed things up. And
| send the data as entity state changes. Like hot and sexy X11
| done since I was born.
|
| The render, compress, send over IP, decompress pipeline will
| just always feel laggy and slow.
| raverbashing wrote:
| This is one startup I never "bought". Sure, they have an
| interesting product, but it is not something I would pay for
|
| As other comment said, it's a vitamin, not a painkiller. And you
| can always buy a new computer or upgrade it. Would it really make
| me much difference to run a browser in a much more powerful
| computer than the one I'm at? Only in extremely limited
| situations
| thih9 wrote:
| Initially announced in 2021:
|
| > We're excited to finally unveil Mighty, a faster browser that
| is entirely streamed from a powerful computer in the cloud.
|
| Source: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-
| the...
| obblekk wrote:
| Props to Suhail for building in the open (takes a lot of
| rejection tolerance) and being so honest about the path.
|
| That said, I work with lawyers as customers and I suspect there
| was an adjacent market in data privacy that a hosted browser
| would have had PM fit for.
|
| A lot of industries have strict legal requirements on controlling
| employee access to data (think healthcare, legal, compliance). In
| these cases, SaaS becomes risky if it can be accessed by anyone
| off their work computer.
|
| The standard solution is to limit the webapp to be accessible on
| VPN, and limit VPN to be accessible on MDM controlled devices,
| and limit MDM to be accessible on company owned devices.
|
| It would be a lot easier to just control the browser viewport and
| prevent data harvesting (essentially what Mighty was doing,
| focused on performance).
|
| Sounds like a small change, but it makes a world of difference
| when it's not feasible to send a physical machine to someone (3rd
| party contractors, overseas employees, low wage employees,
| etc)... something I discovered when talking to lawyers about
| using contractors overseas for routine data entry tasks.
|
| But that's definitely not the same kind of user, or tech
| expertise and would have been a big pivot in itself. Hopefully
| someone buys the IP and builds something cool.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > The standard solution is to limit the webapp to be accessible
| on VPN, and limit VPN to be accessible on MDM controlled
| devices, and limit MDM to be accessible on company owned
| devices.
|
| Didn't the "BeyondCorp" zero trust model pretty much kill that,
| or at least show there was a better way to restricting access
| to secure apps than a VPN?
| fragmede wrote:
| Yeah you're right that there is that, but most of the world
| still runs on the VPN model.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| And yet security VCs are investing here again and yeah, no
| idea why This Time Is Different
|
| We do get VDI users for our tool in some high-end security
| sensitive places to work around weak clients (budget is not
| uniformly distributed across users), but that niche is a
| small market wrt VC..
| closeparen wrote:
| BeyondCorp canonically includes device authentication! The
| way I've seen it implemented is a browser client certificate
| though, kept valid by MDM. No need for VPN.
|
| Of course a certificate could be stolen/transplanted but you
| would need to compromise the laptop first, and that's also
| true of VPN solutions unless the keys are in TPMs.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Beyond Corp doesn't mean those protections are worthless.
| They aren't sufficient.
|
| To the parent post, there's already lots of solutions for non
| performance oriented Remote Desktop environments.
| ryanyl wrote:
| I think one of Mighty's competitors is pivoting and moving into
| that market (https://www.whist.com/)
| MarkSweep wrote:
| As evidence of a market for this, see the company Citrix. Also
| I think Facebook's content moderation website is only
| accessible from some sort of remote desktop system.
| csande17 wrote:
| Funnily enough, the few times I've seen Citrix remote-desktop
| browsers used it's been for the opposite use case: isolating
| potentially malicious websites in a virtual machine so they
| can't compromise employees' computers.
| technics256 wrote:
| Isn't this somewhat achievable already with cloud hosted vms,
| like AWS workspaces? IAM rules, SSO, etc, gets you a long way
| there I would imagine?
| abol3z wrote:
| Seems like the privilege of raising a lot of money without having
| a product, revenue, or market fit can be a curse as well. They
| could have figured it sooner with less money in hand.
| nisten wrote:
| 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 that, but even providing
| a much better experience in terms of battery life because of
| power savings.
|
| Then yeah there was no point paying 20$-30$ a month for a remote
| browser instance. If you can afford that as a user you're either
| already set on CPU/GPU/RAM or better off just buying a used m1
| air for <900$.
|
| It's quite sad of a lesson where you do everything right, work
| consistently hard, be quite innovative, have plenty of financial
| and talent resources, and still fail.
|
| Tech obsolescence is brutal.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > 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.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I looked into remote desktop services but in the long run
| you're cheaper off just buying a computer
| funstuff007 wrote:
| You could say that same about running off-line batch jobs
| on EC2 instances. Unless your co-located data sources are
| forcing you to do so, I cannot fathom why you would.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Even for gaming and workstation use, this seems to be true.
| Last year, the value proposition of remote desktops looked
| great, but it turns out price/performance of all computing
| parts was at an all-time high.
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| I looked into this and found, annoyingly, that even if used
| the Remote Desktop rarely and I could deallocate the
| machine to not get charged, it was actually the price for
| storage that made it too expensive.
| runako wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| > $30/m
|
| That price point was a serious barrier to entry.
|
| I loved how fast Mighty was (even on M1 it was noticeable) but
| there's no way I could justify that expense and I'm a big early
| consumer of B2B SaaS tools.
| runako wrote:
| > 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.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I remember people being very impressed with the performance
| of the arm macs at the time. Maybe they were impressed that
| it met expectations though and correctly predicting it would
| be good.
| swyx wrote:
| didn't need funding skill, didnt need to look at apple
| roadmap, suhail's prior success as a founder was good enough
| for most pple
| ignoramous wrote:
| Certainly has the skill to layoff by the dozen, so given
| the current investment climate, that might come in handy
| too ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869419
|
| In seriousness, going by what Suhail's been documenting
| through their tweets, they seem to fit the _relentlessly
| resourceful_ bracket to a tee, which (according to pg, at
| least) means they have an above average chance at
| succeeding doing venture-scale startups:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| There was no point paying $30 a month _period_. You could get a
| cheap, refurbished 2014 laptop and it would still be a better
| value proposition than Mighty. The only potential buyers of
| this service are SV tech bros, not anyone living in the real
| life.
| [deleted]
| yrgulation wrote:
| > Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a
| remote browser instance.
|
| Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?
| paulgb wrote:
| 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.
| jmathai wrote:
| If people applied that logic of "my time is worth more"
| across everything in their lives - they would be beyond
| broke.
| aniforprez wrote:
| 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?
| csande17 wrote:
| There's a reasonably sized market segment of people who,
| themselves, work at startups with dubious value
| propositions. They try to prop up the whole ecosystem by
| spending a lot of money on each other. (Source: worked at
| a late-stage startup, spent weeks integrating APIs that
| did nothing but were owned by a friend of the CEO.)
|
| There's another segment of people who can be sold snake
| oil. They aren't actually very sensitive to UI
| responsiveness, so they won't notice the extra latency
| added by the streaming service, but they will believe
| claims that it is "faster" than what they're currently
| using in some nebulous way. (These are the same kind of
| people who rewrite their app in React because they
| believe React makes apps faster.)
| lkbm wrote:
| > Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1
| Mac or a Surface?
|
| Yes, probably, but I would note that a cheap M1 Mac is 4x
| the annual cost you cited for the browser, and if the
| browser is 95% of what you use a laptop for, getting the
| same perf boost for 25% the cost sounds like a good value
| prop.
|
| Granted, a laptop should last more than a year, but
| presumably it starts to show it's age in under four,
| whereas the remote browser can improve over time.
| Stention314 wrote:
| Then start to add all aspects: security, network delay,
| service downtime.
|
| I think baas is bullshit for security reasons alone.
| piva00 wrote:
| I had Macbooks that lasted 5 years (2010-2015) pretty
| well, my current MBA M1 is almost 2 years old and I don't
| see myself needing to swap it for another 2-3 at least.
| My girlfriend still uses her MBA from 2014.
|
| I don't really see how I could justify paying 20-25% of
| the price of my laptop per year, that I use for much more
| than just browsing, to have a faster browsing experience.
| And I'm a power user (SWE, etc.) compared to the
| mainstream consumer, the market for this product seems to
| be extremely niche/small.
| upbeat_general wrote:
| Hence why M1 killed them.
|
| Some people do all their work in browsers.
| disiplus wrote:
| but you still need a somewhat ok laptop to use it. Screen
| battery and keyboard are still things that a 250$ laptop
| would be shit.
| morelisp wrote:
| This is an argument for a more broadly-accessible interface
| to e.g. Selenium, not for "the same browser, but somewhere
| else."
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Not only that, but there are clowns that seriously called it
| the future of computing (suhail included).
|
| Reselling Hetzner instances and locking access to Chromium,
| brought to you by the finest VC backed startups.
| [deleted]
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty._
|
| Mighty is only dead because Suhail wanted to pursue what they
| clearly think is a _bigger_ opportunity [0]. Mighty is already
| building its own GPU servers, might as well put them to use for
| AI as the perf and the size of AI models is roughly on an
| exponential trajectory [1]. It may not be long before AGI is
| within vicinity [2].
|
| Though I agree a better strategy wouldn't be to accelerate the
| browser (akin to boiling an ocean?), but instead take one app
| at a time and make it browser-native (like, Photoshop ->
| Figma). A similar concept to (I don't remember who said it),
| take tools hackers use and build it for the Internet (grep ->
| Google, sendmail -> Hotmail, emacs -> Replit, sftp -> Dropbox
| etc).
|
| [0] AIs today can automate away humans on quite a few tasks,
| assist them on quite a few complex ones already. And still:
| models are getting only way more capable, not less.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1501729837366452224
|
| [2]
| https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1590816470845771777
| dinvlad wrote:
| Meh, desktop Intel/AMD chips still beat M1, and are more
| versatile for gaming etc.
| bitwize wrote:
| When it comes to single core, M1 smokes EVERYTHING. And
| browser performance is gated by single core performance.
| sod wrote:
| It did when it came out. But it got already leapfrogged.
| Calculating fibonacci(45) with a recursive javascript
| function takes 13s on my m1pro and 7s on my ryzen 7600x.
| Profiling our angular app in chrome the initial render
| takes 200ms on m1pro and 130ms on my ryzen 7600x.
|
| Apple silicon is still the master of performance per watt.
| But raw performance: It really was just tsmc 5nm what gave
| apple the edge. Apple will shine again when they sit
| exclusivly on tsmc 3nm, but until then, not so much.
| dinvlad wrote:
| Is there some data to confirm that? Both AMD and Intel just
| came out with their new 5Ghz+ CPUs. I doubt that even M2 is
| faster.
| svantana wrote:
| Not generally true. On geekbench, both Intel and AMD have
| offerings that outscore both M1 and M2 on single core.
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
| bombcar wrote:
| Likely they meant "smoked on power per watt" which is
| useful on a laptop, not so much on a desktop or an
| always-plugged in laptop.
| riwsky wrote:
| > where you do everything right
|
| everything except for, as Suhail points out, picking the wrong
| side of a technical trend to bet on. All the technical wizardry
| in the world can't save you from bad strategy.
| dietsprite wrote:
| Couldn't of happened to a nicer guy
| robenkleene wrote:
| 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
| significance of Figma. The web has taken over in collaboration-
| focused software, e.g., things like Google Docs, Slack, etc...
| What really happened is that design has moved from specialized
| professional software (hard to use, powerful), to being more like
| collaboration software (easy to use, light).
|
| I.e., what Figma really signals is that design is now more like
| new task that became more like using Google Docs app, not that
| high-powered tasks like video, photo, and audio editing are
| becoming web apps. This means what really powered Figma's
| takeover was that flat design took over, which is less
| technically demanding.
| [deleted]
| ec109685 wrote:
| All the heavy lifting of figma happens on your local computer.
| The delta between doing that in a browser in a native app is
| only shrinking over time.
| robenkleene wrote:
| 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 comment is that there are other areas the Figma
| hasn't dented at all that prevent more powerful apps from
| being adapted to the browser. And that the fact that design
| no longer needed those features is what paved the way for its
| success.
|
| Figma as part of an app family, is way way more similar to
| Google Slides (i.e., office suite) than it is to Photoshop
| (i.e., "professional" software).
| ec109685 wrote:
| 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.
| robenkleene wrote:
| 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.
| stevenfabre wrote:
| Couldn't agree more!
|
| And liveblocks.io is here to make that happen at scale.
| robenkleene wrote:
| > Figma as part of an app family, is way way more similar
| to Google Slides (i.e., office suite) than it is to
| Photoshop (i.e., "professional" software).
|
| Digging into my own comment here, part of the reason I harp
| so much on the skeuomorphic to flat design change is it's
| such a bizarre thing to happen to an industry, for its
| defining requirements to change in such a way that the
| technology gets so much simpler.
|
| E.g., can you imagine if realistic light rendering suddenly
| was no longer desirable in 3D software? Of course that
| would leave a gigantic opening for new players!
| tpush wrote:
| What's Figma got to with any of this? Figma is local compute
| just as much as any native app.
|
| This is not about web vs. native but client-side vs. server-
| side rendering & compute.
| runako wrote:
| Figma is really slow on older computers. If your laptop is
| (say) 4 years old, it's entirely likely that Figma is not
| usable on it and so something like Mighty might make sense.
| But then when your power supply goes out and you replace the
| old laptop with even the cheapest Mac, suddenly you don't
| need Mighty anymore.
| enahs-sf wrote:
| Why stop at creative cloud... go after autodesk. Hire guys
| writing shaders to build productivity software better in
| browser. Figma showed it can work.
| danpalmer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Media creation maybe, but I feel like professional software
| engineering might move soon.
|
| At the beginning of the year I moved from a company where I
| worked entirely locally, running a local stack, developing in a
| local editor, etc, to a company where I work almost entirely
| non-locally. That happens to be on a box under my desk, but I
| only use it over SSH. It's beefy, and I could get an even
| beefier VM somewhere if I wanted. All my editing is now in a
| web-based VSCode instance which has been much closer to desktop
| VSCode I was using before than I expected. All my builds happen
| remotely. It's honestly an amazing experience. I think things
| like GitHub Codespaces have so much potential here.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| VS code has the best remote features I have ever seen, good
| enough that I once got annoyed VS code had freezed just
| because the network died, then _realized I was doing the work
| over the network_. I hope it will stay a local app with
| powerful remote capabilities.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| What hardware do you use to talk to the box under your desk?
| How do you work remotely with this setup, and what if the
| network VPN goes down?
|
| Working in this way depends a lot on the stack you're working
| with. For languages like Java or C#, where you can't really
| work productively without an IDE, browser-based VSCode won't
| cut it for most people. (I'd prefer a JetBrains IDE over
| VSCode too.) If your language doesn't have a good remote
| debugging story, a remote-first stack won't cut it.
|
| This setup with a box under your desk doesn't sound
| reasonable to me from a financial side either. According to
| your profile, you're at Google, so I assume the hardware you
| use to access the box is a Chromebook. Sure, those are dirt
| cheap, but is a desktop + Chromebook combo really cheaper
| than one reasonably priced PC laptop with specs similar to
| the desktop?
|
| I think I'm still happy with my beefy (spec-wise and
| kilogram-wise) laptop, having the ability to do everything
| directly on the machine (with no network round-trip for every
| operation), and still being able to do things if the VPN or
| the network goes down (with limitations, of course).
| robenkleene wrote:
| I agree overall, but I don't think it'll be VS Code in the
| browser, I think VS Code's remote features with the client-
| server model (client: VS Code's UI running locally, and
| server: the code executing and file-system running on the
| server).
|
| I've also tried VS Code in the browser, and personally I find
| it an absolute unusable mess, the key binding space is just
| way to overloaded for a complex app like VS Code, and the
| browser itself to co-exist (e.g., many of VS Code's important
| bindings get eaten by the browser itself). I think that all
| that really matters is that the UI for complex apps runs
| locally.
|
| (But I could be wrong here, I don't make the mistake of
| extrapolating my own experiences to other users. E.g., I also
| find VS Code to be so slow I avoid, but most users couldn't
| care less. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27360494)
| dinvlad wrote:
| 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/
| robenkleene wrote:
| Yeah I addressed this here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33584880
|
| I _think_ the distinction is that the UI needs to run locally
| so that shortcut-rich powerful apps don 't have to fight for
| the keybinding space with the browser.
|
| I'd say that the migration to the client-server approach for
| professional software is already underway, with VS Code of
| course being the canonical example, but my (limited)
| understanding is that Blackmagic's Da Vince Resolve (which is
| currently eating Premiere and Media Composer's lunch) also
| uses a similar model where data can be stored remotely but
| the UI runs locally.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Microsoft's code editor killed everything in the market by
| using this client-server approach.
|
| It is so seamless that you forget that the code is not in your
| machine.
| Kiro wrote:
| You say "what really happened" four times with four, to me,
| unrelated conclusions.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Trying again, there's one point: What really made Figma
| successful is design moving from being made in "professional
| software" (like say Photoshop, Premiere, Visual Studio, Maya)
| to "collaboration software" (like Slack, Google Sheets), and
| that this was made possible because "flat design" is less
| technically demanding than the "skeumorphic" design it
| replaced.
|
| (Sorry I wasn't clearer, I struggle on how to make points
| like this succinctly without is sounding a bit disjointed.)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree with one of your points (that where Figma really
| succeeded is that it understood better than anyone else the
| collaborative nature of web design), but I disagree that
| flat design vs. skeuomorphic makes much of a difference.
| I've seen more "realistic" designs where the actual
| iconography/images are created in something like Photoshop
| and then just imported to Figma, and Figma handles it fine.
|
| Point being that I think that even if all apps still had
| the design aesthetic of 2008 iPhone apps that Figma still
| would have succeeded.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| > This means what really powered Figma's takeover was that flat
| design took over, which is less technically demanding.
|
| Absolutely 100%. The other thing is that flat design brought a
| lot of low quality designers into the market because you could
| just add a few recommended spacing grids and flat colours and
| get a design out. But because the quality often was low, it
| forced collaboration for cross checking and that caused Figma
| and other software to come to the forefront.
| anhncommenter25 wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| Hasn't cloud compute always been far more expensive than local
| hardware? I don't see any arbitrage opportunity here.
|
| Twenty years ago VDI wanted to replace desktop PCs with VMware
| ($$$) running on quad-socket servers ($$$) with fibre channel
| SAN storage ($$$). I didn't understand the economics then and I
| don't today.
| ip26 wrote:
| The idea is predicated on economies of scale and low
| utilization rates typical of local hardware.
|
| The success of AWS and Azure show it can be done.
|
| (You do have to avoid replacing cheap commodity desktops with
| exotic bleeding edge servers, it's hard to make up for that)
| svnt wrote:
| Which means that if Mighty survived the M1 it would have
| been dead anyway (probably in not more than a few months)
| by Azure and AWS offering it once Mighty proved the market.
| ip26 wrote:
| Not exactly, if the market was small it wouldn't be worth
| AWS's time to provide a turnkey. Plenty of small
| operations provide services backed by AWS without getting
| eaten for that reason.
| jacurtis wrote:
| I interviewed at a very successful startup last year that was
| basically doing the exact same thing as mighty. But they were
| selling it as primarily a security advantage (since its
| effectively an air gap computer) with additional advantages to
| performance.
|
| The product itself was basically identical to Mighty. However,
| because it was marketed as a Security tool, they got customers
| from 9 of the 10 largest world banks, several government
| agencies, and so forth who bought licenses for every employee
| due to the security advantages that having an ephemeral server
| in the cloud provides. The companies enjoyed that there was
| also a performance benefit and they could skimp on physical
| workstations as a secondary benefit. But the product was
| selling licenses by the pallet load because of the security
| aspect, the performance was just a bonus.
|
| Like I said, the product was effectively identical to what
| Mighty was doing. I think it was even younger than Mighty and
| was vastly more successful due to its market positioning.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Can you send a link please ?
| swyx wrote:
| what startup was it? i am unfamiliar with this space and you
| dont seem to have disclosed anything confidential so am just
| asking to learn
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| jacurtis wrote:
| 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.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Called it here back when it launched. Streaming video of a
| slightly more powerful browser in a browser (electron) never made
| sense to me.
|
| And the few people who really had that usecase could just use a
| lightweight container running chromium + guacamole on a nearby
| server. Okay I'm sure Mighty used cool tech to make it faster
| than just that (idk how it worked but maybe they were
| transmitting changed HTML) but at its core the idea was not
| something normal people and 99% engineers would ever consider.
| Anyone rich enough to pay for it would just pay for a more
| powerful machine.
|
| Anyways, they said they have 50% of VC money left and will be
| using it to create an online stable diffusion thingy which
| atleast fifteen startups are doing already including stability AI
| themselves. How can they differentiate ? Can they just use
| leftover VC money to make a completely different thing ?
| swyx wrote:
| "you are not better because you see the world in an odious
| light"
| [deleted]
| Cyberdog wrote:
| > Called it here back when it launched. Streaming video of a
| slightly more powerful browser in a browser (electron) never
| made sense to me.
|
| Wait, the client was an Electron app? Are you serious?
|
| If so, this just goes from a poorly-executed idea to an
| outright fraud.
| IceWreck wrote:
| From their description: We write code primarily in
| C++/JavaScript/TypeScript. Our application is a desktop
| Electron app where the front-end is in JS while the bits that
| need to be fast are written in C++.
| gleb-arestov wrote:
| I've just looked into Mighty. It has delays for hover css
| effects & scrolling. Also it has "Debug > Enable H264 encoding"
| option. So Mighty streams video.
|
| I think replicating DOM & sending diffs instead of video should
| 1) saves resources on encoding for server 2) saves decoding on
| client 3) send much lower data 4) feels much better since
| instant scrolling/hover (something like https://www.rrweb.io/)
|
| I'm indie/solo making Linkkraft browser (to make a living from
| it). Browser to be effective researcher & collector. It
| visualizes your steps as tree and makes html snapshot for your
| each step (even steps in SPAs like twitter).
| https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/comparing/linkkraf...
| https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/trails-tree-plus-o...
|
| As side effect of snapshots you can confidently unload
| documents & save CPU/memory.
|
| Looking forward to grow that snapshotting part into DOM
| streaming. So you can run "browser server" on your own PC,
| while having laptop fast & cool. With almost 0 delays and
| without worrying about privacy.
| dandongus wrote:
| It was very surprising to see how many people were buying into
| this (frankly awful) idea when it was posted here a year or two
| ago. Any one person criticizing it was immediately dogpiled on by
| 10 people telling them how wrong they were. Refreshing to see
| everything come full circle in the end.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tpush wrote:
| Would be great if PG got more humble as a result, but something
| tells me that's never gonna happen.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Everyone can make mistakes. He was stubborn and dumb on this
| one, maybe he is getting old, or maybe he was too emotionally
| attached for some reason.
| [deleted]
| te_chris wrote:
| Humility and rich men with twitter accounts shall never mix
| datalopers wrote:
| He shutdown Mighty to launch an AI image generator. Anytime
| you're told someone is smart or clever, remember they aren't.
| OmarIsmail wrote:
| Mighty as an idea was cool and interesting and I hope the tech
| survives and continues to be developed. Fat clients have their
| place in the world but a solution like Mighty allows for a lot of
| the benefits of a fat client without a lot of the downsides.
|
| I think this is a really interesting decision from Suhail and one
| not taken lightly. I think this decision is another data point
| that AI-infused applications are a potential new "tech platform"
| and we're at the beginning of a new "mega cycle". I.e. web2
| 2002-2010, mobile 2010-2020.
|
| Folks shouldn't be spending much energy on thinking about how
| Mighty may have gone wrong (and seriously the negative analysis
| is so boring and lame), and instead think about the new AI
| opportunity.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| 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.
| leobg wrote:
| It's easy to do. Just tell the founder you're willing to bet
| $10k that they will (define "fail" metric and time). Some will
| take you up on it.
|
| (Though I bet your won't do it as often as you would have
| thought, now that your money is on the line. Pun intended.)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Not that easy. Most founders would not even take the offer
| seriously.
|
| Then you have to choose/agree and pay some kind of
| arbitration.
| polio wrote:
| 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.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Predicting failure is easy, though, because most things fail:
| you can predict everything will fail and be right 90%+ of the
| time. The venture capital model operates on that understanding:
| most things will fail, but in taking a chance on lots of things
| that will probably fail, you're exposed to the very small
| number of things that will succeed in a meaningful way.
|
| Success is the aberration, and being able to identify the
| things that will succeed is where the challenge is. If you
| think you have talent in identifying things that will succeed,
| then invest in things, and if you're right, you'll make lots of
| money. Unfortunately, as you'll discover, predicting failure is
| easy because there's a million ways to fail and very few ways
| to succeed.
|
| Mighty investors would have had 90%+ confidence it would fail,
| but that's fine, because it's the tiny chance it might succeed
| that mattered.
| abhaynayar wrote:
| You're talking from a pure statistical standpoint. Yes, the
| probability that a random startup fails is higher than the
| probability that it succeeds. Nobody denies that. I doubt
| anybody said, "I predict Mighty is going to fail because most
| startups fail."
|
| It's much better to argue on WHY people said that Mighty was
| a dubious product proposition -- from a first principles
| perspective. That way at least we can learn some lessons from
| it. Contrary to what people are saying, I doubt the reason
| for failure is that since Mighty's inception the browsing
| experience has gotten much faster. Because it really hasn't.
|
| Mighty was as doomed in the beginning as it is now. -- and
| you know it if you've been using a web browser for the past
| few years. If you don't live in a bubble, you realize
| $30/month is absurd. These are the important points, not
| "most startups fail."
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Nah, predicting failure or success is exactly the same thing.
|
| VCs don't simply predict success and bet; they use their
| power to make it happen or crush it.
|
| Overall, I have a very low confidence level in most of the
| stories told by VCs about themselves, and I am not sure about
| their positive influence in the economy or technology.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think you'd need a startup prediction market to do this.
| Founder describes startup and success, people bet on yes or no.
| TotoHorner wrote:
| > 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.
|
| No shit? The vast majority of VC funded ideas fail, so you'd
| make money on almost every trade.
|
| The issue is that your fund would blow up every time you
| shorted the next Airbnb/Uber (two companies that everyone
| agreed were terrible ideas at inception)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| You are right.
|
| But the trick, in this case is parsimony, the opposite
| strategy of what VCs do.
|
| Only shorting when I am 100% positive the idea is a fail.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| You can't short bad ideas directly. But you can (or could until
| recently) make money off them by coming up with them and
| pitching them to VCs yourself. That's kind of like shorting.
| GordonS wrote:
| > 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!
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I wish there was a way to short this short startup startup...
| BonoboIO wrote:
| A wild SoftBank appears
| skc wrote:
| He bravely and openly battled through alot of skepticism.
| Unfortunately (or fortunately I suppose), it turns out the
| skeptics were right.
|
| Always seemed like a very, very niche product .
| ec109685 wrote:
| Mighty was conceived at a really dark time in Mac laptop
| performance.
|
| The combination of Intel Mac Laptops that had horrible thermal
| characteristics, browsers that didn't do anything to throttle
| background tabs, bloated websites and limited memory created a
| perfect storm of awful performance that Mighty could address.
|
| Almost all of that isn't true anymore (besides the bloated
| websites which browsers manage better), which decimated the
| potential Mighty market (people willing to spend hundreds a year
| on a fast browser).
| guruz wrote:
| I love the "Auto Tab Discard" Firefox extension.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
| smaudet wrote:
| It's decent tech, I don't think the market was there for it,
| though.
|
| The problem with too many tabs wasn't primarily performance,
| although that was a part of it (disabling background tabs is a
| better optimization), it was that there were too many tabs.
|
| So, cool tech but I don't think most people needed it.
| dhirenb wrote:
| This idea sounded bad like a lot of ideas initially sound (insert
| ipod nomad lame meme). There was a case to be made that consumer
| laptop processing speeds had completely stagnated, chrome wasn't
| getting any lighter, and fast internet was more readily
| available.
|
| But, Apple stepped in with the M1/M2 and totally obviated the
| need for any product like this.
| wilde wrote:
| Props to them for taking risks and making the hard call to pivot.
| We need people building useful tools.
| bagels wrote:
| For those, like me who don't know what Mighty is: apparently a
| web browser that is faster. If that is the selling point, I can
| see why he quit working on it.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| It's a browser that runs remotely and renders the page
| remotely, and the user connects to it via Electron app.
|
| That was the selling point.
| bagels wrote:
| I don't think most people using browsers care how they work,
| so if that was the pitch, even worse.
|
| This is from the home page, it just focuses on faster and
| more capable:
|
| A new browser to work faster. Mighty is a new browser that
| loads pages faster, finds docs quickly, and remains snappy
| with hundreds of tabs to save you time and make you more
| productive at work.
| iworshipfaangs2 wrote:
| I actually thought about this company recently, because slack,
| zoom, Google suite, and all the other work apps perform so badly
| on my linux machine. Even with an i9 I get occasional full
| utilization. I thought I might just embrace the meme and
| outsource my browser. I only use chrome for work anyway. Too bad,
| Mighty, it is possible a similar business might work some day to
| centralize corporate work environments.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Everyone is pivoting to AI creative tools recently.
|
| So much interest and explosion.
| Nathanael_M wrote:
| In a couple decades people are going to have to radically
| consider where they find personal value and identity.
| charbonneau3 wrote:
| There will be apps for that.
| guynamedloren wrote:
| Launched April 2021, discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215
| miketery wrote:
| I'd love to see a mighty type app but for a phone emulator.
|
| I'm tired of all these apps constantly doing stuff in the
| background and tracking my location anytime I use them.
|
| If I had a "mighty" phone app, and could stream an emulated
| device with the apps on that server I'd happily pay $5~$10/
| month.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| What does Mighty offer beyond app streaming?
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| talhof8 wrote:
| 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!
| [deleted]
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a
| painkiller killed it.
|
| Being a project with no customer base killed it.
|
| I remember it being discussed 6 months or a year ago on HN and
| while it was a popular topic, it was not being discussed
| kindly.
|
| It's something that should have never made it past the stage of
| cool demo.
| peter422 wrote:
| Well I think M1 probably put the nail in the coffin but I
| agree, probably still fails anyways. Mighty is cool and useful,
| but is it cool and useful enough for the non-trivial server
| costs? $20-30/month is a lot for a service.
| talhof8 wrote:
| Yup, I agree.
| baxtr wrote:
| 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 painkiller.
|
| Third, I believe almost no product is a real painkiller. We in
| the West at least live in sheer abundance. Almost none of our
| problems is really painful. For example: was Facebook a
| painkiller? Hardly. Was the iPhone a painkiller? Not until you
| considered using it.
|
| I'm not saying the analogy is useless. But I don't think that
| vitamins can't be super successful.
| hollerith wrote:
| >I believe almost no product is a real painkiller.
|
| Heroin is.
| ayewo wrote:
| Imagine the misery people went through for centuries prior to
| the discovery of pain killers. If you've ever had a tooth
| ache, I'm sure you can attest to the efficacy of pain killers
| as a medical invention. They are an enormously important
| piece in the quality of life that most of us enjoy today.
|
| The vitamin vs pain killer metaphor is about building a
| company with a defensible business model.
|
| So, the metaphor is about arriving at an honest answer to
| this question: would the "quality of life" of your first
| customer improve significantly if they switched to your
| product?
|
| If you answer is no, you have two options:
|
| 1. either make changes to your product to make it more
| attractive to your target customers or;
|
| 2. keep the product as-is but change your positioning so that
| the product can be marketed to a different set of target
| customers to which the answer to the question is yes.
| svnt wrote:
| The reason it's breaking down is you're using it out of
| context -- at least in my understanding. It is primarily a
| B2B analogy, and you're talking about consumer tech.
|
| In B2B people buy painkillers because then they don't have to
| do that painful part of their job. They rarely buy vitamins
| (although some do) because those might require them to do
| more.
|
| It's fundamentally about outsourcing/automating your own
| functions.
| mhss wrote:
| 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.
| fuckstick wrote:
| > Analogies always fall apart somewhere under scrutiny.
|
| Yeah but this one falls apart the moment you simply try to
| figure out what facet is trying to be conveyed. Just say
| what you fucking mean. The general painkiller > vitamin
| argument is generally bunk/false dichotomy - therefore
| you're not saving any time with the analogy.
| mhss wrote:
| I never had heard this analogy before and understood it
| immediately. If it didn't click with you that's fine,
| that doesn't mean is not useful.
| iopq wrote:
| My pain point was that my friends were fragmented among MSN,
| AIM, Skype, Google etc. and I had to pay for texts so I
| always used online messaging instead
|
| When I was able to add everyone on Facebook I was able to
| keep track of everyone, and also connect to all the XMPP
| networks.
|
| Currently it doesn't serve this purpose because it's no
| longer a universal messenger, so I don't go on it
| oops wrote:
| I like the analogy. I never heard it before now, but I
| instantly understood what I think it meant: build something
| that is harder to live without. I have nothing to back this
| up but I'd think most people think of a vitamin as easier to
| live without than a painkiller.
|
| > For example: was Facebook a painkiller? Hardly.
|
| I don't know. People without pain do take painkillers. And
| they can have a really hard time stopping. In that sense, I
| would argue that Facebook is a lot like a painkiller for a
| lot of people!
| fuckstick wrote:
| > I don't know. People without pain do take painkillers.
| And they can have a really hard time stopping. In that
| sense, I would argue that Facebook is a lot like a
| painkiller for a lot of people!
|
| Nice, you've explained by demonstration better than I could
| why this is a trash analogy and only confuses issues, does
| not clarify them. Consider stopping using it.
| oops wrote:
| I think you may need some painkillers and vitamins.
| fuckstick wrote:
| People need to be medicated because they don't agree with
| you. Got it.
| talhof8 wrote:
| Vitamins can def be super successful, as you mentioned.
| Agreed.
|
| I think that with Mighty it's just the combination of being
| an expensive product (mainly to operate, but to some extent
| for the end customer as well) + privacy concerns + most
| people don't suffer _that_ much from slow browsers and
| instead willing to pay $20 /30 a month to solve it.
|
| Pretty niche market, I think. But might be mistaken...
| rognjen wrote:
| I think they're yet another example of a company that had a good
| idea but then wildly over-promised. Just like Occulus.
| patentatt wrote:
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Each tweet can have a separate discussion
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| And that's good why exactly?
| fragmede wrote:
| Because each tweet is (possibly) worthy of separate
| discussion. you have
|
| Tweet 1: thesis.
|
| t2: supporting evidence A.
|
| t3: supporting evidence B.
|
| Say you agree with the thesis but think evidence A is weak
| or otherwise want to discuss it, you don't pollute the
| discussion on the thesis or supporting evidence B.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 99% of twitter threaders are incapable of organizing
| their threads like this.
| [deleted]
| ta988 wrote:
| Don't worry someone is working really hard at making sure it
| will go away.
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