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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#271

Post by paradox460 »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #211
paradox460 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't forget that, in my opinion very positive way, it also normalized the concept of "uniform measurements". Every instance of `rounded-md` is the same on a site.

True. I'm grateful for that but typically reach for them via openprops or home built variables for most of my projects these days

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#272

Post by nonethewiser »

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…

They made money by selling components. It was never a good business model. Im fine with saying AI killed it — its not a bad look for AI.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#273

Post by dalmo3 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #223
gherkinnn wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because what makes it useful , like media queries, can't be put in style attributes. Frankly this whole discussion is just as silly as claiming flex has nothing over table layout.

Then again one should aim to not even need media queries and make things responsive intrinsically, breakpoint-free, continuously. A design where things jump at hard coded viewport widths is not actually a great design. So at least that part is not so amazing.

This is certainly one of the arguments of all time. Thank you, HN.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#274

Post by nonethewiser »

xixixao wrote: post #238
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…

This is such a poor comment. It starts talking about the business model, but it’s just a “Tailwind shouldn’t exist at all” argument. Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies.

>Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies.

Yeah but its not. Hence the huge layoffs. If they don’t want to find another software development job maybe they could work at a New Jersey gas station. New Jersey protects their gas station attendants.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#275

Post by esskay »

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #243
argentinian wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure if everyone in this thread is familiar with what their business model was. It wasn't "selling tailwind premium" or selling "tailing enterprise support". They sold a library of react components that happened to use tailwind for styling. So their competitors are DIY, Mantine, React-Bootstrap, and similar.

I'm not sure they'd even be classed as competitors to be honest. They floundered massively with the ui kit, most sections of it were very dated and untouched for several years whilst they piddled about with a failed new ui kit that never took off, for which they blamed ai.

The reality was that a big chunk of their initial audience came from Laravel, and as other players emerged and made what was Tailwind UI irrelevant it all seemed to compound into them panicking and making some rather silly business decisions. At one point they had a sizeable team and shipped nothing for a good 8 months, and when they did it was a couple of beautiful but completely impractical landing pages. They just didn't convert it to a sustainable business.

Oh and to add to it, they alienated their paying customers by dropping support for basic js based components in favour of making the entire ui library reliant on heavy js libraries, killing off any interest from most of the Laravel customers who'd been their initial target audience.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#276

Post by [deleted] »

petcat wrote: post #25

I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX. Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.

[deleted]

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#277

Post by esskay »

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.

This was after they laid everyone off, so it was just Adam and Steve left. An they surpassed $2M a year in sponsorships a couple of months after that. They were not struggling for cash at all.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#278

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

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)

I still think the only reason to use jQuery is if you need IE11 support.

Otherwise, it's really simple to do all the things you mentioned without the complexity/heaviness of jQuery. Something like this:

``` const $ = s => { const r = {}; const els = [...document.querySelectorAll(s)]; r.text = t => (els.forEach(e => e.textContent = t), r); r.on = (ev, fn) => (els.forEach(e => e.addEventListener(ev, fn)), r); // ... return r; }; ```

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#279

Post by nonethewiser »

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.

If nothing else, it definitively proves AI produces real value.

I hear the contrary a lot but Im not convinced anyone actually believes it.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#280

Post by [deleted] »

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #243
argentinian wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure if everyone in this thread is familiar with what their business model was. It wasn't "selling tailwind premium" or selling "tailing enterprise support". They sold a library of react components that happened to use tailwind for styling. So their competitors are DIY, Mantine, React-Bootstrap, and similar.

[deleted]
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