Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2].
There was this product[1] to browse internet offline by downloading something called “Web Packs”. This was back in 2005 just when I was graduating when I spoke to the founding team. They were naturally quite confident about the product taking off. Something seemed off to me I couldn’t point out what so I didn’t take the job offer. After all these years I realized the source my discomfort. They were actually betting against the speed of internet getting better. While most of the businesses like Amazon, Google were betting for the internet tech to improve this product did exactly the opposite.
To me Mighty sounds like a similar category of product. They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on. Exactly when Apple has launched M1, which blows the previous version out of the water, at a non crazy price. From this point it’s a matter of time other hardware also catches up in terms of performance and price.
Besides, yet another company to handover my entire browsing history and data for purported improvement in latency? I don’t know.
> They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on
No, they are betting that no matter the processing power of computing devices of the day, developers will always push things to the limit and ship products that can end up being slow on devices used by a large share of the population.
This has always happened, because software product makers always want their products to have as many features/capabilities as possible, and release them to market as quickly/cheaply as possible, which means there are lesser incentives to limit functionality or to invest in performance optimisation.
There's no reason to believe this trend will cease, so Mighty is offering a service that allows people to get much higher performance of their webapps without always needing to have the highest-power computing device in their possession.
Agree, it's an arms race at this point between end consumers and app developers. However, it also means once Mighty becomes popular they have to contend with developers overwhelming their computing resources as well.
As long as Mighty keeps providing a better experience than the local browser on the average user's own device, they'll have utility for a significant number of people. Developers still need to provide satisfactory-enough performance to the bulk of their audience. Mighty is for the users in the right tail who are willing to pay for better-than-satisfactory. There's no reason to believe that right tail will ever disappear.
> developers can now ship any horribly optimized thing
No, they can't. Only the right-tail power users will ever pay for this. Unless almost all of a product's users are in that group, the developers still need to offer satisfactory performance to the rest of their users, or be vulnerable to a new competitor.
> Centralized processing of all computing, would just make current issues like censorship, security issues worse.
People keep saying this. I doubt even Mighty believes they or their paradigm will take over "all computing" - just the niche that really needs it. Even a small market share can make them a big/successful company, but without making the whole internet significantly more centralised than it already is. I don't get the panic.
The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs. At least 80% of the time my computer isn't even used. And when I use it, I doubt average load is over 25%. So the Mighty model has a 20x utilization advantage by those numbers.
That should easily support twice the peak CPU power for me when I need it.
Another thing is that the Mighty CPUs will (presumably) be upgraded continuously, while my laptop CPU gets no faster after purchase. If that makes me only buy a new laptop every 4 years instead of 2, I've saved a lot of money and hassle.
I'm not saying this means Mighty will conquer the world. But there are reasonable arguments behind the model. Especially if you assume bandwidth will keep improving.
Yeah, but I think it's better to think about it like virtual/remote desktops, where the granularity is a browser tab.
At least, that's the only way it makes sense to me. I might understand that to do 4k high res 3d on my phone - my phone will need help. And once that "help" is available - my TV, and my tablet and my smart watch can make use of it.
But I'm not generally willing to trade latency for cpu time sharing. What is interesting is an always on, always working desktop session. It's why I like screen/tmux and ssh, rdp - and would consider running a Linux terminal server, so my laptop(s) and desktop(s) could be a disk less, stateless thin client.
Make the observation that the browser tab is the new process/application granuality - and it makes sense to host tabs in the cloud.
Personally I'd want to self host it - but the idea doesn't sound quite so inane.
Hmm, I feel like this is missing that those cpu workloads are "bursty", and probably all burst around the same time for a given region. This analysis of unused computer time assumes they can sell your unused time to someone else, which either means network latency to another region or more capacity in the same region as you when you have similar usage times as everyone else. I have no idea if this idea works but I don't think it does for that reason.
And I've responded with the reality of the business model. There's no "CPU sharing" on "my computer". It's a beefy VM in the cloud.
Well, it most likely shares the CPU with other VMs, but that depends on the cloud, and the instance. And since the browser is always open, Mighty will always run that VM, with no sharing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063554
"They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on."
Me playing the devils advocate...
Perhaps not //forever//, but perhaps for the next few years (enough for them to make some good money).
Why? Chip shortage, GPU shortage.
Anecdotally, I just bought a computer for $7500, that, two years ago would have cost about $2500 (granted, it is the new tech, but even so, new tech of this tier two years ago would have been approx. $2500). On top of that, have to wait two months for it to be assembled. (ouch)
I agree with you that speed will probably not stop increasing, but if prices continue to go up, or even just level off, few people will be able to afford the new tech.
That being said, would I invest in Mighty? No since I agree with you in general....and agree with you about the zero privacy issue...very regressive position for someone like PG imo.
That assumes that AWS/Azure/GCP won't have the same issues getting chips to run Mighty on that PC manufacturers have getting chips to sell to consumers though. If the shortage keeps up, that is not necessarily true.
What if the future is that you don't necessarily just buy a machine in the future.
What if, when you purchase your machine, it includes a host of features including a could suite of things like; VPN, Cloud Browser, An actual amount of decent cloud storage, portable applications, hosted in your cloud bucket, but accessible from any device (If I have Illustrator, I can just run it from any machine - not just my own. I can allow guest access to my paid licenses - like Say i want my brother to be able to draw stuff on my Illustrator license while I am not using it.
Etc.
Imagine if instead of that $7,500 "computer" you bought a $7,500 'stack' and the access terminal you happen to be using most is the physical laptop that youre used to.
I tried to build something similar to this more than a decade ago (2007 or so - but wrote about it in 2004).
My biggest issue is better information/knowledge management.
I have TBs of files and data strewn all over. We should be focusing on "my information" and let me manage and secure that - and access it from any device easily, and securely.
If augmented reality tech works better the necessity of cloud as your machine will become ubiquitous.
However I think we gonna do have RTX in our mobile devices - AR glasses, whatever modern mobile tech - because of decentralization (security/ethics purpose)
Couldn't they instead be betting that despite improvements in hardware speed the web will bloat faster than the hardware improves? Betting on that doesn't sound that crazy to me.
That is indeed one of their premise. However that also has, perhaps unforeseen, implications. To start with, their VMs have to be at least one step better than the end consumer's machine. Can they do it without increasing their price? Secondly, there's no guarantee that developers will overwhelm even Mighty's cloud resources?
All that said, it's worth noting that the first set of customers seem super impressed. So maybe Mighty are on to something.
My hang up with Mighty isn’t about their idea or their technology or their execution. It’s impressive to see what they’ve done.
My issue is that it’s not a product I could feel good recommending to anyone, at least at the high pricing that was proposed in the last discussion. In an era of $999 M1 Macs (and even cheaper AMD laptops) and readily available financing options, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to throw their money away at a SaaS service that simply cannot perform as well as local Chrome on a modern machine.
I could see the narrow use case for limited situations where someone has
1. Weird IT department restrictions that require them to use old, slow computers but also
2. Budget rules that allow them to spend monthly money on a SaaS but not on financing the hardware they need to get their job done and
3. Guaranteed high speed internet all of the time and
4. An IT/corporate security department that is okay with them sending all of their keystrokes, login info, and browser data to a 3rd party service
Surely this situation exists, but it still feels like Mighty is targeting a broader audience by providing untrue claims about remote thin client technology somehow being faster than a halfway decent local machine. I’d feel equally uncomfortable if Stadia was charging $50/month while claiming to be lower latency than local gaming.
The counter arguments about disrespecting hard working startup founders or doubting visionaries feel like a strawman response to legitimate questions about the value of their service. The technology and execution look to be good, AFAICT. It’s the product, pricing, messaging, and value that I can’t recommend.
I was going to try Mighty but even in my somewhat relaxed work environment item 4 is not really solved by Mighty apart from "we will not access your data". Obviously they are very smart and will surely be working on E2E encryption but they do not seem to have it.
The whole value proposition is that the beefy remote machine is handling the rendering, isn't it? At least half the performance of a web page is wasted on DOM re-shuffling.
Not to mention, it's not like Chrome can run Javascript without looking at the data, and if they're not running Chrome, they'll start getting into compatibility issues.
If Mighty behaves like a full replacement for a modern web browser on my system, it will have to give the web pages I visit (opt-in) access to my GPS, camera, microphone, Bluetooth, battery information, and other peripherals, I sliding all of my mouse and keyboard input. It will have to allow me to upload or download files from the web page. Also, all my tabs are running on the same remote VM, so this only protects other systems, not my banking or JIRA.
Sure, it's the ultimate sandbox for the code itself, it probably protects me perfectly from Meltdown attacks against other programs on my main system, but I don't think that's enough to call it 'endpoint security'.
I don't have the faintest idea, but the notion of having my session cookies and credentials stored in a VM somewhere makes me very nervous and I am not even half paranoid.
So they need to figure it out otherwise it's only valid for personal use, which is not exactly the money is, imho.
Maybe some self hosted solution for corporate departments? Or waiting for an acquision from Citrix or VMWare...
>4. An IT/corporate security department that is okay with them sending all of their keystrokes, login info, and browser data to a 3rd party service
Or just an IT/security department that is blissfully unaware of the shenanigans that some of its users are up to. Especially if people are accessing this from outside of the corporate network to start with.
No but it makes a lot of sense for Mighty App to be the middleman between your computer and the Internet. If I was them I’d just give it away for free and sell your data to Facebook (anonymously of course!)...
My company uses webmarshal which fronts requests and blocks pages deemed not good for productivity/data security. In that type of situation you already have an intermediary so mighty could make sense - make everyone use mighty and give it a custom blocklist. Obviously not a situation that employees would be a fan of, but it’s something that corporate is already doing, and mighty could improve the experience.
I agree with your stance. I was confused to come here and read that people thought he was referring to Mighty. I think Mighty is a pretty small, easily proven/disproven, not-crazy idea, not-that-new idea, with niche applications. To me that is a bit different than how this article reads. I think the debate is market size. The only real debate I hear with Mighty is whether it is good for <10M people worldwide or >1B people worldwide.
From what I understand of both the recent tweets and both of their fairly radical/extreme (and mostly correct) views about abstraction being a net negative, the criticism is less "Mighty doesn't work" and more "We shouldn't need to use an app like Mighty to get good performance on a basic website".
Sure, but the disconnect seems to be that Mighty is advertised for people who essentially use their browser as an OS (I see Figma mentioned a lot), rather than people who just want to do basic browsing.
I think Mighty has unfairly taken the brunt of a lot of growing discontent with bloat on the web. I'm not ready to fork over $30+ for faster browsing, but I'm glad someone is working in this space, because I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a step in that direction.
At minimum it seems like I’d have to choose an instance size, an OS that was compatible with my software, install the editing software, mount a common storage location with my footage, etc.
What I’d like to see is a service that let me add my credit card, click a button, and launch a video editor on a high-RAM machine that I pay for the hour (including the software license fee).
I am actually in Mighty's market if it cost ~$10usd per month, not $50.
At our startup we have a small org of customer service reps. They basically live in four tools: Notion, Slack, Chrome, and Front.
These four tools have one thing in common: they are all Electron apps. They SUCK. On any windows computer slower than a $1.5K lenovo, our reps can't have more than ~10 tabs open before their computer starts to stutter.
One answer would be to buy everyone an M1 mac. However, most of these reps are not familiar with apple (they use PCs at home) + they are still a bit too expensive (we're in Mexico where they cost 1.5 - 2x).
I would love to be able to buy our customer service reps a setup (monitor + mouse + computer) for ~$500 USD and have them use Mighty to run our customer service suite for $10-$15 bucks a month. That would scale to a customer service org of hundreds.
At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac.
IMHO Suhail's pitch about "running figma" is wrong. I'm happy to buy a designer any computer they want. But outfitting a CSR team of 50+ people? Mighty + a thin client would be amazing.
How long before the $500 Lenovos and Dells have same ballpark performance to the 2021 M1 Macs? AMD or NVidia will inevitably release an ARM chip that competes with M1, and it will just be 12-24 months before this is commonplace.
I don't buy the argument that performance will always get tapped out by developers. There is an upper limit to what even a horribly architected 2D web app needs to consume.
Maybe! Hopefully! But it begs the question: why is the situation so bad now? What will change? It's not like the apps I mentioned are inherently complicated.
I think the situation is bad because developers are expensive, and really expert devs that know how to optimize app performance are even more expensive. You mention Notion and Slack and other Electron apps. Not to disparage the teams on these projects as they are impressive from a pure UX perspective. But building these complex apps cross-platform native is particularly difficult today. So Electron is used as a shortcut. The usage of Electron allowed Slack and Notion to grow rapidly with a smaller team than they otherwise would were they to try to replicate in Windows, Linux and Mac as well as web... not to mention mobile. And once an app is established and has tons of features, as they both do, doing a rewrite is both expensive and risky. Big rewrites almost always fail, and they divide your precious dev resources even more.
You can probably buy them a VDI desktop for $20 per month (Amazon Workspaces and Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure are in this ballpark) and run Chrome on that. Especially with WVD, there are thin clients made specifically for it (or you can just use an RDP client on any OS).
Well, if the Lenovo or Apple M1 were 3.5 to 5 times cheaper, they'd also be a good deal, right? In fact, they'd be a better deal than a 5 times cheaper Mighty, I would wager.
They didn't reveal their true business model or pricing yet.
The $50 subscription is a way to simply not flood their servers while beta-testing them, and also getting a bit of money from rich/dumb early adopters.
It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.
I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.” But then I stopped for a second and got curious. What is Mighty, really? It is a thin-client. That’s it. And are thin-clients a bad thing? Well, if latency is an issue, sure. But “high-ping” is a somewhat solved issue, whether in multiplayer gaming, in terminal utilities like Mosh, or even in optimistic GraphQL mutation updates. Where’s the use-case where near-zero latency is vital? The only cases I can think of are games like Rocket League: fast-twitch games where even the latency between my controller and my PC is something I happily spend hours optimizing — where latency prevents the necessary feedback loop for learning (akin to trying to learn how to hit a baseball while drunk).
But beyond near-zero latency use-cases, why would a thick client ever be better than a thin client? At the edge of performance, this question is easily answered: I would never attempt to train a PyTorch model on my admittedly powerful GPU. That’s what the cloud is for. So when it comes to my browser, why am I content to eat up memory and cpu-time with hundreds of tabs open that almost always include one or two that are broken, soaking up my resources, and have to be hunted down and killed off so that IntelliJ can return to its normal lightning-fast speed?
Might goes even further and asks why I would want to run IntelliJ on my machine at all. Wouldn’t I rather run IntelliJ like I used to run Vim over Mosh, where I never have to worry about storage space, about download/upload bandwidth, or about my computer becoming sluggish?
And that’s the killer idea here: that thin-clients almost always beat thick-clients. One could even argue that the entire internet is premised upon this reality.
I’d happily pay Mighty to try it out for a bit. Even if it doesn’t work, I’ve dropped more money of less fascinating ideas. At the very least, I’m rooting for their success, because it would change a lot more than how you consume content over the internet.
> I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.”
I haven't found Chrome slow on my mid-range PC (i5-7500). Or my phone (Pixel 3).
I feel like I must be in some parallel universe to everyone else talking about how slow Chrome is.
Just now, I loaded the first 6 links on Hacker News. 1 didn't load at all due to a server error. The other 5 all loaded in under a second (measured by DOMContentLoaded). I have uBlock Origin enabled (only in Firefox on the phone). Maybe that helps.
I can have 100+ tabs open without slow down if I want to. The bigger problem is I'm less productive with 100 tabs open because... there are 100 tabs open. It's just too cluttered.
I'm willing to admit Mighty might be a good product if people have this problem with slow browsers. I just never found this was an issue. Maybe it's a problem on low-end machines, but how many people have a low-end computer but are willing to pay $50/month for Mighty?
I just set up a new computer and I was wondering why Chrome and Firefox was so slow. Then I remembered I hadn't set up AdBlock yet.
I wonder if Mighty has ad blocking? It's an interesting question of which will be better for their business -- blocking or no blocking. (I won't try it because of the obvious privacy problems, because I use a fast computer, and avoid slow web sites. But it probably has an audience.)
The post is about crazy-new idea. This app is a RDP solution that is not a crazy or a new idea. It all depends on economic viability and marketing to the right people.
> It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.
I was curious about Mighty and looking forward to their technology. That’s not the problem.
The judgment came largely when they announced that it cost up to $600/year. It costs so much that it’s actually cheaper to buy a whole new computer if you might need it for a year or more. Once you put a price tag on something and ask people to pay for it, judgment is fair game.
This whole dismissal of people saying that they couldn’t justify the product for the price as some sort of anti-curiosity thing feels disingenuous.
If people will pay 2x or 10x the price of self-hosting for AWS, then I have no doubt that some people will pay 2x or 10x the price of a laptop for Mighty. (I wouldn't, but I also don't use AWS :) )
> Where’s the use-case where near-zero latency is vital?
I would say typing is a pretty big one. It is extraordinarily unpleasant when typing lag is anywhere above maybe 50ms,and even worse when it is variable, like it would inevitably be if going over the Internet. It's even worse with mouse movements, where occasional spikes in lag can ruin your day.
This is a solved problem though, with optimistic updates. See Mosh, which does this for the terminal. If you've ever had to run Vim on a high-latency remote connection, it feels like having superpowers.
Sure, but it's not solved in Chrome, is it? Mighty is just a VM running Chrome as far as I understand.
Not to mention, the problem is fundamentally simpler in a terminal, with a very limited range of outputs. The problem of optimistically drawing the result of your input on the screen is much harder when that input could affect any portion of the screen in any way, like it can on a JS-powered web page.
>even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity
PG wants you to think that they're mutually exclusive. They're not, but he has a product to hustle.
The problem (for PG) is that curiosity is not uncritical. Curiosity poses more questions than those in the category "how well does this product work?" Anyone actually curious is going to wonder about the problem space, not just one proposed solution.
Pretty obvious questions include: "how did software get us to the point we're exploring this as a design?" and "could the problem it seeks to solve be addressed in a way that eliminates assumptions about the solution space?", "What are peripheral ramifications of design decisions, and how much do I care?" "Would other approaches solve the same issues, have the same ramifications?" or "Are they synergies to leverage by trying multiple things in concert?"
> It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.
His arguments are too vague to specifically defend Mighty. You can insert any technology and his arguments are neither valid or invalid.
I think the key difference between a pytorch model and your browser is that you’re actively using and manipulating your browser and a pytorch model is a long running process without the need for second by second interaction.
And as you note the need for more power goes beyond a browser, IDEs, gaming, rendering, Bitcoin mining. Why just do it for the browser? You can, and some people do, remote into a more powerful machine for all of their work. This was the norm when terminals were true terminals. We could go back to this, but having your own computer historically had much larger benefits for people.
> why would a thick client ever be better than a thin client?
Because thick client distribute the load among many computer. With a thin client all that load is way more centralised.
> I would never attempt to train a PyTorch
No one is asking you to do that. We're talking about Mighty, a thin client that:
- runs a beefy VM in the cloud
- runs a single app, Chrome, in that VM
- streams video to the client
If a million people run Chrome on their laptops and keep it open for the entire day (and your browser is usually open throughout the day), that's... just a million people with their laptops.
If a million people run Chrome through Mighty, Mighty needs a million VMs always open, and a million video streams, also always open.
See how a thick client is better than a thin client?
I have no dog in the fight either way, but I think it's weird that their demo product shots are on a Mac when part of their pitch is
> "50+ tabs without your computer coming to a crawl"
On Macs, people can just switch to Safari for free and solve that problem. Yes, Chrome is a memory hog. Stop using Chrome, don't send all your browsing data to a third party.
Perhaps Windows would be a better choice for Mighty demo shots, since there may not have a better option than Chrome for Windows.
I just bought an used Lenovo desktop that’s a few years old, but has an i7 and 32gb of ram. It handles a hundred tabs without blinking.
I think the bigger problem is the artificial constraint we’ve put on ram, why are we still selling computers with 8gb of ram?
If a “Crazy New Idea” (CNI) is getting VC funding from establishment tech capital to deliver a twist in an existing product, it doesn’t seem like it could be so crazy.
Reading this I thought of CNIs like the Internet of the 1980s, women’s suffrage in the 19th century, Project Mercury, The Eiffel Tower.
The CNIs gaining ground today in tech seem to be crypto, brain-computer-interfaces, quantum computing, and CRISPR gene editing.
I follow Blow's work and opinions quite closely. I am quite confident he was NOT criticizing Mighty specifically. Instead he was deploring the state of software engineering in general and web programming in particular. He is saying something like "I can't believe web engineering sucks so bad that a tool like Mighty actually makes sense". See his talk about preventing the end of civilization (!!):
Definitely highlights something I've always felt, which is that we're really making life complicated with all those tools and processes that are less than ideal.
I get the feeling business and the need to "ship" stuff is the thing really bringing technology down, even though it looks like it's moving it forward.
I did not take Jonathan Blow's tweet to be saying it's a bad idea, or won't work, but rather that it's an indictment of the whole web stack that it's necessary.
Watch any of his talks and you'll know for him it's definitely the latter. He's complained about bloat and the web stack in particular plenty of times.
Also note he's currently developing a programming language called JAI that's trying (and seems like it might ultimately succeed) in being a faster and smoother alternative to C++ for developing games.
I'm not upset about Mighty itself - I'm sure it's a fine product made by some decent people.
No, I'm upset that Mighty is necessary. That we, as an industry, have failed so hard that multi-gigahertz mult-core machines with gigabytes of ram can no longer consistently and quickly render documents without offloading it to a central server.
Graham does this often. Instead of directly saying what he wants to say, he beats around the bush. When Allred was getting criticized for shady business practices, Graham wrote haters and thanked him and Musk and a bunch of other people.
Not sure why he does it, it is very underhanded, as though he's afraid of actually getting in a legit argument with the person. Easier to pontificate form his essays, have them posted to his website, then have the mods defend him.
"Essay is french for attempt." There are good and there are bad attempts, of course.
I think he genuinely believes these issues are much broader than a single company. So he wants to encourage discussion about the general issue, instead of sparking even more unproductive, repetitive argument about a single company which would overshadow the broader and more interesting issue he sees.
(As we can see here, where a quarter of the comments are debating the business model of Mighty.)
We have game streaming services from NVIDIA and amazon has had Amazon workspaces. With the global chip shortage which will affect a large amount of people I think that this would be the best time to prove your product to have a good effect.
Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation.
> Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation.
By that same token the average persons browsing habits are also not the same. Optimising for Chrome power users who have eleventy billion tabs open and run hefty web apps isn’t the normal usecase. My families browsing is mostly taken care of on a 2012 MBP and a couple of ancient iPads. Mighty would be functionally useless for us.
Heck my entire day is spent in Chrome working in Drive and writing code in our own development environment in our web app. I am a browser power user in that sense on a three year old gaming laptop and I don’t understand the Mighty usecase. It’s a niche within a niche at the moment although I understand the appeal of the business model.
The business model is obvious. Data. The new petrol.
The use case is the question. The general trend against personal computing. The naïveté of todays startups and VC in general.
But this is nothing new. It will pass, some people will get rich, some will lose money.
Do I like it? No. Do I care? No. Why? Because I have learned my life lessons well. If something survives as tech standard, it will be used. So I focus my attention on not being early adopter on any kind of tech.
Geforce now or even renting an entire computer with shadow is for graphics performance, and is not 30 bucks a month. You also won't be entering any sensitive data while playing games.
I think it's a cool thing they've done, but it requires you to put full trust into them as a company.
If there was a similar offering as mighty for certain development tools including Xcode and android studio together, that would be awesome and something I would look into. Basically something which would reduce the build times.
I don't understand how Jonathan Blow of all people, figurehead behind several great video games that would have been impossible to run on a supercomputer 25 years ago, could possible have this take.
I think that corporations may want to force all their users to use Mighty so that they can control exactly what goes on in the browser -- it is easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious extensions.
Maybe even prevent browsers from downloading files onto the local computer. A full recording of each user's sessions. Integrated password manager that uses the Mighty login to tie them all together.
So I view it as valuable to corporations and thus mighty falls into the B2B category of company which makes software end users hate, but corporations love.
> easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious extensions.
Not denying your other points but Amazon Workspaces[1] is a product that perfectly fits their needs.
From a top-level exec's stand point I would imagine they would be more willing to buy something like Amazon Workspaces which gives them 100% control and peace of mind Vs piecemeal approach such as browser, conference call client etc.,
Do you think low paid workers are going buy a cheap laptop for 500$ and pay 30$ or 50$ per month for Mighty instead of just getting a more powerful Window laptop for like 1000$ or 1500$?
M1 macs can be had for $999, and they can even be bought with cheap financing options to convert it to a monthly payment.
Maybe there’s a market for people stuck on old computers but whose companies still spring for super fast internet and $50/month SaaS bills per user instead of just spending that same money (or less) financing the laptops they actually need, but it would be a small market.
[0] https://www.mightyapp.com/
[1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389
[2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224