I wish Mighty had succeeded for a different audience. The core value prop "make figma faster" was not very compelling--people who need to use Figma can buy a mac.
You know who does struggle with slow computers and memory issues? Call center employees who have to run Front, Slack, Chrome, and probably one or two other electron-based apps.
At our startup (not in USA), these issues are so bad we've ended up getting 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 should have been competing with Citrix and others in the B2B space rather than in the B2C space with MacBook users. I am not sure why they didn't, even with something like Citrix they could outcompete it on UX alone, like Zoom did with Webex, ie lower latency, it "just works" etc.
Probably due to time constraints. B2B takes a long time to get moving, B2C allows fast feedback for rapid iteration early on. B2B requires integrations, lots of tangential work that doesn't build the core product.
They may actually have made the right decision - it got them to "time to pivot" without running out of cash.
The browser focus was peculiar since there seems to be little room to generate enough value to justify the cloud costs.
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 agree with your core point that Mighty could have succeeded, but specific to your use-case: Mighty is “just” a nice layer on top of well-established remote-desktop technology, what pushed you towards M1 MacBooks instead of remote desktops? There’s lots of great options out there, comparable to Mighty on price (a little more management overhead, for sure, which is why Mighty was the ideal option — but still much more cost effective than buying MacBooks).
It would never actually have been cheaper. The problem basically is that time of access isn't actually distributed, and a lot of the time leaving stuff set up and running is important.
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.
Reasonably priced PC laptops that can run Chrome and Electron do exist. Just don’t buy bottom of the barrel Celerons, instead target an i5 or a Ryzen 5 (or maybe a higher-end i3).
From my experience slow laptops are slow not because of the cpu (I mean, we’re not running a chess engine here…) but slow disks and slow/not enough RAM, which compounds the disk issue as soon as you start actively swapping… which in some of these is about as soon as the OS boots.
Like, I just loaded up the Best Buy app and 3 of their top 10 selling laptops only have 4GB of RAM. I haven’t used a computer with that little RAM in over a decade.
There was another company called S2 Systems doing something similar to Mighty a bit earlier, they ended up selling to Cloudflare and I think the technology became the browser isolation product:
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.