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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#261

Post by echelon »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #237
dlisboa wrote: 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…

> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be. But what if people were already selling them, and tailwind showed up, did it better, and people went directly to them to buy what they were offering? Why shouldn't that exist? The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an…

Humanity evolves.

We wouldn't need doctors if we had a box you could walk into that cured all ailments.

We won't need software engineers once you can crudely specify requirements and have a machine turn them into rigid requirements with a solid data model, flexibility to extend, infrastructure to run, and monitoring and recovery to maintain reliability.

A lot of things change when technology evolves.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#262

Post by mijustin »

popupeyecare wrote: post #46

I was a huge fan of Steve Schoger's YouTube Series - Refactoring UI. Taught me so much about design. Congrats on the exit. Hope it was good. Bring back the series! https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchoger

Agreed! I get inspired just by seeing him talk through his approach to design problems.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#263

Post by PaulHoule »

joleyj wrote: post #96
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…

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 bus…

It’s hard to name a more pathological market than office suites. You have Microsoft which is lackadaisical about the subject, like maybe they think Office is a place to stuff with thoroughly unwanted AI features. The rest of the market is German zealots who spend all day with bash and emacs who lobby legislatures to subject public servants to off-brand office suites and then the public sector unions go on strike to get Microsoft Office back.

Bundling is one reason who can’t have nice things. Like in my opinion Excel is a lot worse than the others but if customers are thinking about a “suite” they are still going to buy Office to get Word and PowerPoint and can’t save money by switching to a different CSV wrangler or financial analysis tool.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#266

Post by abanana »

petcat wrote: post #181
jjice wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what jQuery brings for you these days? My favorite jQuery features got implemented in the vanilla DOM APIs (document.querySelector and fetch being the big one for me). Now I'm curious if I'm missing out.

I prefer the terseness of jQuery's API and things like chaining dom operations with the fluent API. I don't like the native DOM API. Too verbose (I still read and review code)

Makes sense to me. Their motto was "Write less, do more", i.e. its conciseness was a major selling point, but that seems to have been forgotten now that its other selling points have been rendered obsolete.

I recall scripts ending up as little as one-third the size of vanilla JS, when rewritten using jQuery (where the website was otherwise using jQuery anyway).

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#267

Post by Onewildgamer »

biinjo wrote: post #183
boringg wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define small?

If you look at the monitor, the Shopify logo fits between the thumb and index finger, I suppose that's the only small thing about Shopify, lol. All joking aside, I don't think most of us consider Shopify as a small company. I personally hope that Tailwind stays around after this acquisition. I was there when Shopify bought Remix and that project is as good as dead in the water now.

I liked remix so much, very sad it ended up in a graveyard

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#268

Post by perardi »

nullbio wrote: post #133
mehagar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you switching to?

I'm probably going to catch heat for this, because people (I did too, I won't lie) have a visceral reaction to the Javascript for styling, but... StyleX. It came on my radar a few months ago when I first started noticing this rot problem. Then recently I saw that it was getting quite hyped and people have been singing its praise for solving this exact problem. So I'm giving it a shot. Can't say for certain whether it…

That blog is obvious AI slop.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#269

Post by _heimdall »

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…

I don't see any reason the business model shouldn't exist, though yes their scale was a challenge IMO.

Selling off the shelf, tested components and themes isn't a bad business. I'd firmly put it in the lifestyle business category, I just wouldn't expect it to sustain multiple high paid engineers on fulltime salary and benefits.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#270

Post by notahacker »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #237
dlisboa wrote: 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…

> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be. But what if people were already selling them, and tailwind showed up, did it better, and people went directly to them to buy what they were offering? Why shouldn't that exist? The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an…

> The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent.

They also offered an Open Source CSS framework with the explicit goal of making it easier for you to style your own components. There was always some tension between "make abstraction layer whose adoption depends on users finding it easier to make your own components with than vanilla CSS, which is not unusually hard" and "sell pre-made components". Particularly when there's an abundance of alternative FOSS components/libraries out there[1] in vanilla CSS or even full blown CMS templates for people not wedded to the idea that Tailwind makes things easy for them. Much easier to sell templates or even "premium components" when your USP is integrating them with a backend them rather than merely providing the layer of syntactic sugar supposed to make component styling easy...

They also happened to have the misfortune of designing it in a way which is particularly easy for AI which doesn't have to tradeoff time spent making design decisions and figuring out how to achieve those from the docs vs dollars spent buying components to minimally tweak.

[1]tbf, I always thought the Tailwind creators' designs were more tasteful than the average CSS mixin library even though I didn't think the same about the syntax...

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