I was critical of Mighty on twitter, but not because I think it can't succeed. I don't want it to succeed. The whole concept is solving a problem that shouldn't need to be solved, ie running bloated web apps on commodity hardware. Mighty is essentially subsidizing bad software engineering practices and passing that cost onto the end consumer in the form of a monthly subscription service. I don't want to pay $30 a month so that Adobe can spend less on R&D optimizing their web apps.
Adobe could spend a billion dollars on R&D to optimize their web apps and still not get it. It's not an engineering problem, it's a corporate structure problem.
The only way to solve web app performance is to put 5-7 engineers in a room and say "we want it fast. As fast as possible. Get to work."
But no, they have the front end team, who has to run everything by the compliance committee, and the architecture committee, and the API committee, and the back-end team, that has to run everything by all the committees and the front-end team, and they also have to wait on the infrastructure team before they can test any of their stuff, and before you know it 12 weeks have gone by before an engineer has written an actual line of code.
And none of this corporate structure can be fixed because the CEO doesn't understand it, and all the management he hires to fix it are financially incentivized to continue holding their little fiefdoms.
I believe it will be a successful business by normal measures, but not live up to the hype and vision of its founders and investors. I think there will be market for a tool, especially with enterprises where people are forced to use a particularly slow web-app or need other isolation features.
But for other people? Can you imagine Adobe saying "Here is our product, now please purchase this third-party cloud service to be able to use it." They either improve their software or launch their own server-driven app to capture those $30. That's my take.
