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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

91–100 of 378 posts

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#91
post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

there's never a need to reach for tailwind, it's just a pathology some people like because someone else did the design work for them

I think the second half of your statement disagrees with the first.

Much like saying, "there's never a need for Scratch, it's just a way for my kids to code fun things without worrying about semicolons."

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#93
post #65
post #6

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.…

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If i…

I agree that a CSS library is not really worth a big business. But nobody has woken up: AI makes writing tailwind classes more convenient than ever and that’s what people seem to do.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#94
post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

Tailwind is still considerably easier to work with than vanilla CSS. You just have to write less.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#96
post #79
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If i…

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better. I happily paid for Tailwind UI b…

I think that “lots of money” needs to be put in perspective when thinking about software that’s used by developers. When you compare the size of the market for these kinds of tools compared to a truly massive market for something like an office suite, it looks pretty puny.

Developers are also very fickle and the one constant is change. Sometimes it seems like change for changes sake alone.

I’m not saying that any businesses easy just that it seems to me after seeing a lot of companies come and go, but this is one of the more difficult markets to capitalize on.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#97
post #79
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If i…

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better. I happily paid for Tailwind UI b…

"The market" for Tailwind only existed due to ignorance and obfuscation fueled by hype for web dev jobs.

Completely artificial market built on propaganda and low interest rate money printing. Same as the rest of SaaS. Nothing about the tech industry since the '08 crash has been organic investment. Was 100% collusion between government and private interests to manipulate public opinion.

> They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.

Good luck with that:

https://www.openui.com/blog/oui-1

Aside; all the leaked emails, chats, and going back further in time, telegrams, letters, travel logs on display in court yet the myth the economy is an organic free market this whole time persists

Such belief is nought but a quirk of biology that allowed humans to latch onto the idea Benevolent but Punitive Sky Wizard watches out for them; total cope. In Wealth of Nations Adam Smith called it the "invisible hand" and later came to realize he was wrong. He reconsidered and concluded the avarice of man will not be stopped by philosophy of national unity.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#98
post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

Writing CSS in a way that will scale up with the size of your project and team is just as hard as it's ever been, you still have to come up with a convention for doing that, including taking into account what newer features bring to the table. Having to manually edit it was never the pain point.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#99
post #79
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If i…

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better. I happily paid for Tailwind UI b…

> I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it.

The business was worth something. But, as the earlier comment questions, was it worth millions? Or was that the free money, tech hype talking? Maybe in a more normal market it would have only been a simple mom and pop.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#100
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If i…

I don’t agree. Building a date picker used to be next to impossible. Overnight it was trivial. That’s some serious disruption.

Nonsense. There have been perfectly good free date picker widgets available for every era of web development, going back to clunky server-rendered html templates.
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