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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#121

Post by dlisboa »

simonw wrote: post #77
f311a wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got like 10 new sponsors, you can see it on their page. They are one of the top OSS projects in terms of revenue. I can't recall any other OSS project that makes so much money and has nothing to do with infra/cloud. They were making around $1M a year back when they complained about the revenue. A lot of Linux distros can only dream about such an amount of money.

$1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.

They achieved $2 million revenue in the first 5 months of the first Tailwind UI release.[1]

They had a very good run for such a project.

[1] - https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#122

Post by jt2190 »

dlisboa wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: 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…

Your analysis is fundamentally flawed because you’re conflating the Tailwind’s business model, which is based on the actual realities of the market, and your ideal for how frontends should be developed.

There are millions of Single Page, and other “complex” web apps. You not liking it does not invalidate anything.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#123

Post by simonw »

tempfile wrote: post #118
simonw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.

Right, and as a consequence lots of very important software (orders of magnitude more important than tailwind) does not have full-time employees. Good for them if they can manage it, but it's a gravy train.

Given how hard it is to build any form of financially sustainable model around an open source project I think we should actively celebrate anyone who manages to build a model that works, not dismiss it as a "gravy train".

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#124

Post by raincole »

dlisboa wrote: post #86
fg137 wrote: 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?

This is a good discussion: do LLMs change the calculus for DRY? A major point of components is having a single place where you can change design and behavior across your entire codebase. With LLMs you can with very good accuracy tell them to change the look of "all buttons that are confirmation buttons in modals but not in the login modal". Doesn't matter if there are 10 such buttons or 1000, it'll take a few seconds…

Frontend development in the early days was nightmare. I don't know why people pretend there was some kind of golden age but there really was not.

You could still develop frontend in the old way. Most browsers are very good at supporting old websites. But on one wants that.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#125

Post by camdenreslink »

argentinian wrote: post #64
danvayn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to vi…

Yes. Maybe their business model was never sustainable and now they are unfairly blaming IA as a scapegoat to justify layoffs.

I think their business model was sustainable, but depended on SEO. AI made it so people would either use the LLM generated tailwind syntax, or the "AI Overview" at the top of the Google search results and never land on the official tailwind documentation site. Less visits on the official docs meant less people would see the paid offerings, which means less people would buy.

It's possible they could have explored other marketing channels (youtube?), but it seems like the death of SEO for this sort of content lead to the main issues.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#126

Post by rgbrgb »

danvayn wrote: post #89
listless wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That was certainly not overnight. The biggest disruption they personally did was offering a better alternative to Bootstrap. More customization, JIT compilation that allowed for custom class interpretation without any added CSS, proper flex consideration, removing unused library classes in the production compilation step, etc. Beyond this, you should really be thanking things like Shadcn for the “date picker disrupti…

why shadcn and not bootstrap? shadcn is like a cool weird approach to a ui kit but bootstrap got us a date picker iirc.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#127

Post by 40four »

vachina wrote: post #95

Wondering when Shopify is gonna wind up next. Not a good time to be a (small) software company.

Shopify is a publicly traded company, and they own a significant share of the whole e-commerce market, they aren’t going anywhere lol :)

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#128

Post by GeneralMaximus »

fg137 wrote: 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?

I quite like Tailwind. I've had great experiences with it, especially on projects where the skill level of contributors was highly variable.

That said, Tailwind is not as powerful as plain old CSS. It's a bit like training wheels for CSS—you gain some guardrails and prevent newbies from messing things up too badly, but you also give up the power modern CSS affords you.

E.g. I invite you to look at some of Ahmed Shadeed's (https://ishadeed.com) layout tutorials, or whatever you find on the CSS-Tricks/Masters.dev homepage today. It's bonkers what you can do with modern CSS!

Tailwind gives you access some of what's possible with CSS today, and they keep adding support for new features, but it's impossible to express everything CSS is capable of using only utility classes. At some point, you need to write some actual real CSS code.

So personally, it's a tradeoff for me. If I really want the full power of CSS, I use plain old CSS. If I'm willing to trade power for the convenience of Tailwind's built-in design tokens and guardrails, then I pick Tailwind.

Both approaches are good and valid. The right choice is context dependent. With And with LLMs in the mix, it's not that hard to port a Tailwind codebase to plain CSS, or vice versa, so picking the wrong thing doesn't have as high a cost as it used to.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#129

Post by lofaszvanitt »

Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers.

Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water.

I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, frontend joes are so below average in brain capacity that they need their shiny thing covered in stickers saying "modern" and "state of the art", otherwise they feel dirty, like they haven't taken a shower in a week.

It's like building a framework to simplify the SQL dialect. In reality, there's zero need for it, because SQL is so simple and easy to understand that you'd have to be a moron to use some kind of framework for it. The same applies to CSS. Tailwind is an abomination, a horrible mess, just like all the other pointless CSS 'frameworks'.

These aren't frameworks. They're just some semi-psycho control freak's projection of control over something that doesn't need controlling.

Let's just say it out loud: Tailwind is being rewarded for turning tons of frontend joes into complete idiots by telling them the tale that their shiny thing is the new standard, when all it ever was was an experiment in the gullibility of inherently moronic people.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#130

Post by micromacrofoot »

Waterluvian wrote: post #91
micromacrofoot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

That's true about Scratch so what's the problem? You don't need to use Scratch if you learn the syntax of whatever language you desire to use.

Tailwind is a design library for people who don't want to learn or write CSS. They don't technically need it.

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