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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>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
It's easy to forget, but a lot of people were rubbishing the idea of ARM Macs as a viable replacement for Intel until it actually happened.
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.
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.
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.
did this product have any appeal? the price was insane for something i get for free, if you could afford it and needed it you could afford a decent computer that could
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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..
> It would be a lot easier to just control the browser viewport and prevent data harvesting (essentially what Mighty was doing, focused on performance).
Not really, the client can still OCR whatever the browser viewport contains, even if the server just streams video.
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.
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.
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.
> First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins.
Also in the real world, people who sell vitamins lie a lot, and some people believe some really stupid things about vitamins. So the ultimate vitamins are antivirus products, I suppose: Sometimes needed, often a waste of money, and actively harmful more often than the naïve would suspect.
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!
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
That's a terrible bet to take as a founder. Assuming even odds, put aside $10k for some time, and you may double it if you're doing well and probably don't need it, but if you're failing, you lose the money.
> 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)
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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”?
"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.
I think this is true in one sense and false in another.
It's true because users often don't complain about 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 (except in extreme cases).
But it's false because even moderate performance differences actually have 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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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
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.
It's easy to forget, but a lot of people were rubbishing the idea of ARM Macs as a viable replacement for Intel until it actually happened.
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.
> 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.
Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?
It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.
Reselling Hetzner instances and locking access to Chromium, brought to you by the finest VC backed startups.
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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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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..
To the parent post, there’s already lots of solutions for non performance oriented Remote Desktop environments.
Not really, the client can still OCR whatever the browser viewport contains, even if the server just streams video.
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!
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.
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.
Also in the real world, people who sell vitamins lie a lot, and some people believe some really stupid things about vitamins. So the ultimate vitamins are antivirus products, I suppose: Sometimes needed, often a waste of money, and actively harmful more often than the naïve would suspect.
> 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!
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.
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...
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
Heroin is.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
That's a great idea for a startup, VCs would be falling over themselves for a piece!
(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.)
The only utility is vengefulness, perhaps.
Then you have to choose/agree and pay some kind of arbitration.
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)
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.
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...
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!
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.
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Just thinking of the literal mountains of ewaste gives me goosebumps.
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.
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.
It is our job to care so non IT people don't have to.
https://web.dev/rakuten/
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.
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”?
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.
It's true because users often don't complain about 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 (except in extreme cases).
But it's false because even moderate performance differences actually have 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.
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.
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