You know who does struggle with slow computers and memory issues? Call center employees who have to run Front, Slack, Chrome, and probably one or two other electron-based apps.
At our startup (not in USA), these issues are so bad we've ended up getting people who earn $700usd/mo M1 macbook airs anyway because otherwise an electron-based workflow is unamnageable.
I would have loved to buy them cheaper computers instead that ran entirely in the cloud...plus extra permission management, no local storage, and other "really, really, really nice to haves" for remote workers dealing with PII.
If Mighty's value prop had been "never worry about remote wiping an employee's computer ever again, oh, and it's faster too, and it's all OPEX, and we charge you by minute instead of by the computer" I would have signed up immediately.
They may actually have made the right decision - it got them to "time to pivot" without running out of cash.
I'm surprised they didn't try to pivot to another initial market en route to building a general cloud PC.
My company (https://softdrive.co) is in the same space - our initial focus is on empowering companies running high end graphical workloads (BIM, CAD, etc) using cloud PCs.
Curious why per minute billing appeals to you. Usually we've heard preference for predictable monthly pricing.
I'm not a fan of depreciation schedules and whatnot, but I don't think Everything as a Service is going to be the answer.
Like, I just loaded up the Best Buy app and 3 of their top 10 selling laptops only have 4GB of RAM. I haven’t used a computer with that little RAM in over a decade.
Mighty wasn't the only game in town:
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/products/zero-trust/browser...
https://www.cloudflare.com/products/zero-trust/browser-isola...
I used the demo, it was quite good.
Also what apps do you want to run? Slack, Front, what else?
I wonder what vision did Suhail pitch to PG to deserve high praise. Because this can't be it.
Although they did claim to keep your browsing data privet: https://www.mightyapp.com/security
Maybe four years ago it was seen as a strong counter to ad/tracker blocking. But now, with increased regulation and consumer resistance they couldn't make that play?
See: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...
In my opinion, this is the right goal, but I don't think this can be done by running existing apps in the cloud (and remoting their UI). Instead, I think we need a new cloud-native platform so that any app can be written as a cloud app. (Obligatory self-promotion: that's what we're trying to do with https://gridwhale.com)
IMO the core paradigm shift that needs to happen is for the software and infrastructure to become commoditized. The only way for cloud-everything to not be a nightmarish abuse of the end-users is for the mode of operation to change, from the current "data comes to the app", into "app comes to the data". That is, I believe the data, the application and the compute running it need to be independent to the extent possible.
In particular, the choice of an app and where it runs should be entirely up to user. The user should be able to easily switch from e.g. a cloud run by Amazon to e.g. a "cloud" run by their HOA in the basement of their block of flats. And then possibly switch to a cloud run by a company local to their city, or one of their employer, etc.
The primary point behind my view is to prevent application vendors from being able to take their users hostage by keeping users' data under lock on their own infrastructure, accessible only through their own software. The second point is to increase efficiency and boost local markets worldwide.
just read your site, and I’m thinking of this as more like a super massive global mainframe?
From what I've read, sounds like a thin client machine based on the web. Chromebooks but even thinner, relying on SSR. I think that's a plausible vision that could have driven the upfront costs of hardware down in return for a subscription.
Pithy vision - "a new type of web-centric computer"
Edit: I really liked following Mighty, and it's exactly the kind of speculative startup that you can respect and admire even when it doesn't work out. They didn't do anything wrong, they tried to make a useful valuable product but failed. A worthy endeavour.
just take the Sun marketing and sprinkle AAS.
There are many CAD, Visualisation, Rendering, Editing, and Simulation tools that are incredible CPU, GPU or Memory intensive that could be made available in a collaborative environment for the first time using some of the Mighty tech. I hope someone picks it up and explores other ways it could be used.
Reasons people don't use these solutions are the same reason Mighty ended up not working. Even in CAD applications, latency matters when trying to move objects in 3D space with precise mouse input or using a 3dconnexion spacemouse. Sure, you can overcome latency by doing what Google essentially invested in with Stadia, run GPU's closer to the edge but at that point the cost of just buying workstations for your employees is not that different from acquiring a stable connection (for 8+ hours a day) with the fee of renting the hardware.
Here’s a demo of a full-blown Blender “running in the browser” (I don’t have a demo with local compositing yet, so this is all server-side)
https://twitter.com/drifting_corp/status/1583460106963820545...
I beleve Citrix is mostly a standard VNC type product where everything is rendered on a server and streamed. I was envisaging a toolkit to enable you to build an app where parts of it run in cloud, parts of it locally.
Think of a 3D cad tool, the ui could be all local, but the rendering and compute is in the cloud. Or a 3d physics based ray tracing app, you could do the 3d wire frame locally, but have the real-time ray tracing happening on a very large server.
On top of that, by have a cloud based state, it's only one step away from marking that state shared with other users to enable collaboration.
There is no technological innovation left in this space. You can package it with a nice GUI and convenient user experience, but I feel like that's hardly a billion dollar startup idea.
What I want is for the address bar to give me a really quick way to jump to existing tabs, if I start to type in the address of one I already have open. The entire reason my tabs get out of control is that at some point I get enough open that I start to lose track of what's there, and repeat myself. End up with like 5 AWS tabs, only one of which I'm actually using, stuff like that. So finally I just bookmark the whole set ("just in case"—I've not once looked back at these, in almost a decade of working this way, though I bet there's some great shit in there) and start over.
Apple's "tab groups" approach being a solution, but the trouble is I forget to switch to the correct group for a given site and end up using a single jumbled-up session anyway. It needs better (more automatic, probably) UI.
This actually came up in a thread the other day, so feels weird to be talking about it again, but I've been playing with Arc[1] lately. Took me a while to get used to how they treat tabs (almost more like bookmarks) but I've enjoyed it. Squirrel the ones I want to truly keep around into folders ("To Review", "Some Project"), but all the randomly opened tabs automatically get closed after a specified time period (default 24 hours, I have mine set to a week). When I hit cmd+t I can _reasonably_ often get to the right tab I've already got open.
I have a feeling the honeymoon will end when they start trying to figure out a monetization strategy, but so far I'm rooting for them.
[1] https://arc.net/
I try and be disciplined but like you end up having to manually stop myself and drag tabs back to the ‘proper’ group.
Chrome's been doing this recently and I absolutely love it
I'm pretty sure that javascript being largely single-threaded was well known knowledge since day 1. Did they not know this? Did they think that mulit-threaded javascript was just around the corner?
Seems crazy to not know your application's performance profile before picking out the hardware to run it.
Genuine question - I might see if I can find out next time I have to do a performance profiling in Chrome!
web workers have their own thread, but I think adoption is low.
Network requests are async (JS doesn't have to wait for the network request for it to do other things), but JS can still only start one network request at a time.
The group of people for which a browser is truly horrendously slow would be on something like a low-end Windows laptop. From mid-end and upwards it's fine (or good enough) and for Mac users pretty much never an issue.
The people with such crappy hardware are exactly the group to not be able to afford 35$ a month. That's like the price of 3 or 4 streaming services combined. Just to browse!?
Basically this product was a solution looking for a problem. The pricing is ridiculous of course. But I don't see how a lower price would have solved that problem. And the pricing was tied to them basically using very expensive VMs (16 cores, lots of RAM, GPU). And since they struggled with quality of service issues (i.e. it did not actually work that well), the whole thing was doomed. But even if it had worked, it would basically still be a solution looking for a problem.
1. Personal computers are dead and just a means to access a browser via dumb terminals
2. Applications will be Figma style - web based entirely.
3. Intel/AMD chips are bad and not getting that much better (this one is true, but missed the mark entirely because of Apple silicon throwing a curve ball)
4. Given that your personal computer is basically a dumb terminal to a web browser you could imagine a world where it doesn't matter and it's worth paying $35/mo for a super computer to run your web apps streamed to whatever local hardware you're using, since your local machine is basically useless as a machine and only serves to load a web browser (which is where your actual applications are). This super computer will also remember state so any devices you access mighty on is exactly as you left it. Long term, this could end with a Chromebook like devices of some sort that just connects to mighty and are really nice low power hardware.
--
Personal bias aside (I hate this future and I'm actively working on software trying to bring personal computing back in a from first principles networked way) - it was a bet on trends and fits squarely into the PG concept of a good startup being a bad sounding idea that might have recently became good because of changes in the environment that have not yet been really recognized. I think Apple made it less relevant. I also agree there's a weird issue of who is the actual target market at that price point (the exact people that would maybe need it can also afford good hardware).
That and there is obviously fertile ground in AI right now and the founder sees a bigger opportunity there with a lot of low hanging fruit.
Define "bad". I'm on a 2019 MB Pro with an i9 with 32G of ram. I pretty much never have browser performance issues that bother me. I have Chrome open with 2 windows and a total of 39 tabs, plus some other apps that people always like to bitch about resource-wise (Slack, VSCode). Granted I'm not a designer so I don't have what would be some of the most resource-hungry apps like Figma, but if there is one group of people who I've always seen spend a shitload on their desktops/laptops it's designers.
I think Mighty was always a weird project that pretty much only solved a problem for people that would never be willing to pay for it.
Seems like the founder just moved on to the next shiny new toy instead of fighting it out until the end. I have a sneaking suspicion PG won't be talking about him anymore.
I see they've been distracted with AI art just like everyone else and had to jump on that bandwagon :).
Don't get me wrong -- Stable Diffusion is probably the fastest progressing thing on the internet in decades.
It sounds like M1 was the nail in the coffin - though you'd think this is a normal question for an investor to ask re defensibility when deciding to invest in the company (a version of the classic "What if Google entered your market?"), and thus something they would have had rebuttals for?
I'd argue that this isn't a retrospective in it's truest form. I would like to have a piece that's more about the metrics, like what sort of churn they got, how was their launch perceived, what sort of market research they did/ didn't do etc. These sorts of pieces would help make the lonely startup world more transparent and accessible (it's easier to do this after the fact, rather than when keeping up appearances when trying everything to keep a company alive). Perhaps Suhail will bless us with this at some point.
https://twitter.com/ishish/status/1591841784967352320?s=20&t...
Q: It was a great product I was a paying customer. I used it like crazy on my old MacBook but as soon as I upgraded to an M1 Pro it didn’t feel as a must have for me and wondering if you found that with others
A (Suhail): We did but the mac market isn't as big as the PC market so it wasn't a critical factor in the decision but certainly had an impact as mac users.
This person's claim that Mighty customers didn't open huge numbers of tabs and use a ton of RAM makes no sense. What OTHER purpose could a $35/m cloud browser possibly serve??
In general all alternative browser products that charge money face the same issue. Netscape already tested this business model in the 90s.
For this reason and for many people this app was DOA from the inception. The founder should have carefully considered this criticism instead of disregarding it and using it as "fuel" https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1196458286347776001
Sadly it seems his new startup is jumping on the trend of generative AI. This is another product category that is doomed to failure yet has tons of tech industry fanfare (similar to web3, which is on its deathbed). For most professional artists, it's not hard to do the actual drawing, the difficulty is coming up with the subject matter / concept for the drawing. Generative AI may have a market for low quality yet high volume content creators that auto-generate content on YouTube or other social media for a modest living.
interesting that https://www.mightyapp.com/ still has not been updated with any mention of shutdown
I believe the biggest reason for their failure and lack of traction is because they misidentified their value proposition from day 1.
No, loading web pages marginally faster is not going to make you more productive. It will save you a few minutes per day in the best case scenario, nothing else.
Productivity does not come from loading speed, it comes from how quickly you can identify the information that matters on a page and absorb it.
This HackerNews page took 320ms to load, but I've been on the page for 5 minutes already. They really think saving even 90% of the load time is going to make any difference to my _productivity_?
And I think it's a very niche use case to have hundreds of tabs open - like, that's hoarding, like, just close some, you'll never get to all of that.
I'd also expect their pricing to go down given economies of scale.
I lowkey wanted them to be super ambitious and one day roll out their own chips and become a full stack computer company.
* Pivoting towards enterprise. Not with speed in mind, but instead security/control/compliance.
We didn’t spend too much time here, so I can’t definitively say this wouldn’t have worked. Cloudflare had (has?) just this vision when they bought S2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is.... There is at least one critical roadblock that I see: wifi and networks can be spotty. If only 80% of a company’s employees have good enough internet, what do you do as an administrator? Force them to figure out notoriously difficult wifi problems? If you don’t, those that don’t like the browser will simply not use it because they’re not required to. Given this, I always thought of this as a secondary market. First, make something great, independent of being required to use the product. Then start building out other tools that make businesses more enticed. We did sell to companies in multi-seat deals, and were eager to keep pushing in this direction. Note the tag line: “A new browser to work faster”.
* CAD/Rendering/Simulation/etc instead of a Browser
The trend is that all of these are moving to the browser. However, maybe not fast enough and Mighty was too early. It’s also a more crowded market (Citrix, Teradici, now Parsec, etc) and yet smaller than the browser market (well, by users at least).
* Powering browsers inside of mobile VR/AR
We never tried this. My sense is we’d be too early (at least 2+ years?).
* Accessibility, e.g. for screen readers
This was never a big enough priority but yeah, it seems solvable. It’s more or less another API to implement.
* Loading web pages faster is not going to make you more productive
As I see it, there are two buckets of speed. The first is to make fast things faster. The second is to make slow things faster. The two can work together. The real value prop is the second, but the first is where you can bring lots of delight. But I think there is some truth to this. Of the loyal paying users that we had, they felt substantially more productive. But could this benefit offset the price + downsides? Knowing what I know now, I don’t think so. But there’s a lot of context about what’s actually possible, what a wide spectrum of people value, etc that gets me to that conclusion.
* Who really, really, has a slow browser that’s willing to pay $35/month due to it?
This was my first thought when we starting working on a Browser. One thing I learned was to hold back my gut instinct and prove the answer, instead of guessing it. The empirical answer: thousands of people that we could find through minimal marketing (just Twitter, basically). Does that mean there are a million+ people out there that also have it? Maybe.. it’s hard to tell. But my personal hope was that this quantity generalized somewhat to the 2B users of Chrome so that we could at least make a profitable business. If we got there, we could move into areas where we were solving more problems.
So to directly answer the question: I’m pretty confident this market exists. But not if Mighty also has the downsides it did (doesn’t work well in cafes, a variety of bugs, etc.)
