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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#321

Post by bdcravens »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #173
bdcravens wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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’m not sure what their valuation was but single digits millions sounds totally reasonable for a company you’re describing. Just to hire 10 engineers you’ll need to be in low millions

I don't want to diminish the work that any developers do, but a headcount of 10 seems high to me. (Unless some of those are simply "support engineers" who do nothing but support paying customers, but that would go up and down with revenue)

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#322

Post by ajkjk »

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…

strongly agree except that "million-dollar business" is such a low bar these days that I might argue a larger number is needed for the point to stand.

People are reacting foolishly to the word shouldn't here. It's not a "moral" shouldn't; it doesn't meant anything like "shame on them for existing". It's a technical criticism: the only reason this business was ever viable is that the rest of the ecosystem is in such a sorry state that it became worth spending money on this thing that should have been trivial.

A similar claim would be: Jquery shouldn't have existed, because browsers could have done a not-terrible job in the first place to the point that its existence was necessary. They didn't, so it did exist, but it shouldn't have had to.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#323

Post by slopinthebag »

echelon wrote: post #261
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I doubt AI will ever become omniscient

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#324

Post by slopinthebag »

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.

bro your own website has hard coded viewport widths where things jump

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#325

Post by chairmansteve »

spiderice wrote: post #222
dawnerd wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s far from dead. All of the AI models struggle with creativity and consistency. There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX.

> There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX Given the past 3 years, I will never understand how people can be so confident making statements like this

Yeah. Where's the "well designed UI"?

The only thing left is my Roku box, and it seems to be starting on the road to crappification.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#326

Post by echelon »

slopinthebag wrote: post #323
echelon wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt AI will ever become omniscient

Hydrated sugars certainly think they themselves did.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#327

Post by vendiddy »

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…

Maybe you're overthinking this?

Tailwind saved me time and the pain of writing CSS so I paid for it.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#328

Post by PaulHoule »

(1) Shop Pay is one of the services that I’ve seen grow fastest in market share ever. Like in the last six months it seems like almost every independent online store sees my phone number and offers me a text to pay via shop.

(2) Tailwind is part of the CSSSlop ecosystem that includes of course the original Bootstrap, SASS, Emotion and many similar things that never really worked from an ecosystem perspective because learning the specifics on one CSSSlop framework never means you don’t have to completely understand CSS. CSSSlop just forces you to learn more things and face more cognitive overload.

Now that CSS includes most of what CSSSlop did, you can just use CSS and that’s a good thing. And if AI can answer questions about CSS and save you from trying to find answers in splogs or learning to navigate 50+ spec documents to find definitive answers, isn’t that a good thing?

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#330

Post by xixixao »

nonethewiser wrote: post #274
xixixao wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tailwind is free. The company’s paid offerings are clearly not useful enough in the world of AI. That’s the crux.
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