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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#191

Post by froggertoaster »

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…

Sort of a weak and dismissive take. Tailwind saw a problem in the market, addressed it, and made money for a while. Why shouldn't that business model exist? It exists across SO MANY other industries.

People pay for aspirin, not vitamins, and Tailwind is aspirin.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#192

Post by mermadicsolutio »

I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product.

Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore.

Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#193

Post by ryanbrunner »

bdcravens wrote: post #143
atonse wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"nor should it be" is connected to "being worth millions". It's not that it isn't worth money, but it's more of a lifestyle business than the sort of thing that will drive a tech company with employees, marketing, and conference budgets.

I think if you said "couldn't be a venture backed startup", I'd 100% agree with you. Can't support employees or a marketing budget is a much lower bar, and I think that's perfectly achievable by something like Tailwind (or I guess was prior to AI)

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#195

Post by micromacrofoot »

chinathrow wrote: post #177
micromacrofoot wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the insult? Tailwind is specifically for people who don't like writing CSS because it avoids various ways CSS works and comes with predefined styles.

"Pathology"

it's objectively a pathological use of CSS because it circumvents the C (cascade)

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#196

Post by ryanbrunner »

paradox460 wrote: post #154
sodapopcan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.

You have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better thi…

I think there's plenty of developers that are perfectly competent with CSS who still reach for Tailwind.

You're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#197

Post by autoexec »

binary0010 wrote: post #44
RA_Fisher wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof. It’s so sad when businesses with in-demand products suffer from a lack of successful economic mechanism design.

They had a very successful economic mechanism design for many years. It's one that thousands of businesses have relied on for decades. Create great free product, create rich tutorials and docs, people look them up and you can sell variety of services from there. Then ai companies stole the data, put a $20 pricetag on it and wiped out all those businesses essentially overnight.

If those "variety of services" are worth anything they should remain popular. There are countless ways to advertise them to people. I'm guessing many devs who were regularly browsing their documentation had ad blockers anyway.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#198

Post by eudamoniac »

vazark wrote: post #88
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?

IMO, Tailwind is just inline CSS with standardised defaults. I think it found its place because most React devs didn't want to bother with CSS

It is used because UI component frameworks make vanilla CSS an awkward an unnecessary tool (the Cascading part). CSS makes sense as designed for styling a document, but not so much for styling atomic components. If we were designing the web and CSS from scratch around the React model, CSS would not be made to cascade, because that is totally unnecessary and usually leads to more issues than it solves. Apart from theme variables, in a component system there's no reason to have global CSS anywhere; you'd just style each component in isolation. So when in the React model you typically want no cascades at all, the library that is made for that gets popular.

CSS modules are also a solution to the above, but, once you get rid of cascading, and you have one stylesheet per component, it is again unnecessary to have the one stylesheet in a different file from the one component. There's no benefit to splitting a component and its styles into two files; it just makes it more annoying to edit. So we move the styles essentially inline, with either Tailwind or CSS-in-JS.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#199

Post by ryanbrunner »

danvayn wrote: post #51
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.…

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…

What AI replaces isn't Tailwind (AI will reach for Tailwind pretty readily), but the paid ecosystem that was Tailwind's business model. The value of having a pre-built component goes down when building that component is a 10 minute job of an agent.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#200

Post by everfrustrated »

wongarsu wrote: post #105
atonse wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just for reference, in the .NET ecosystem there are multiple vendors selling UI component libraries for sums ranging from lower three digits to upper three digits per dev, per year. This was generally considered good value (might no longer be great value post-AI)

Problem was tailwind had a very weak component library. I'd have been happy to pay for a more expansive set of components.
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