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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#401

Post by 14u2c »

what wrote: post #381
onion2k wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be. Arguably many websites and apps desperately need a good component library because it's very clear the UI sucks without one. Lots of people spending a few thousand dollars on their UX is not unreasonable at all , so the best-in-class library (whether that's Tailwind is a separate point) should be able to make a…

The pain point tailwind supposedly solves is that people who are supposed to be front end web developers don’t understand CSS.

That’s like saying a carpenter doesn’t understand woodworking because they sometimes buy pre milled lumber. Or that landscaper a doesn’t understand mowing because they don’t trim each blade of grass individually.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#402

Post by ernsheong »

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.…

Wow, citing we need to figure out how to pay out bills and rejecting PR based on that is such a douche move. The fact is Tailwind core is an MIT-licensed open source project.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#403

Post by weird-eye-issue »

notahacker wrote: post #270
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…

> 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…

> 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"

Do you have an example?

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#404

Post by beezlewax »

iohvvbhdyh wrote: post #163
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.

Indeed. I saw their job ad just months before this with full remote 300K salary.

What does it being remote have to do with anything?

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#405

Post by shunia_huang »

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

If you are implying that AI models can do 'well designed UX', I would really love to learn the way of doing it.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#406

Post by spbaar »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #145
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…

> and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) I have nothing against Tailwind, but I think a company with $5 billion in cash reserves and the general context of Shopify may buy a company like Tailwind for community goodwill, to stabilize the technology that they use for their own business model, to acqui-hire the principals, and various other reasons other than Tailwind's business model. > On the commercial…

I imagine it has to be for their expertise in translating developer intent into practice and refining the shopify specific markup conventions. When I misread the headline as Spotify I couldn't think of why any org, even very front end heavy, would buy them. But continuing to support a language that will always be in it's own lucrative domain makes perfect sense.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#407

Post by bvrmn »

recursive wrote: post #355
bvrmn wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without tailwind LLMs tend to use inline random colors, random sizes and radiuses. Project becomes an unmaintainable design soup really fast. Even with tailwind first priority is to define dark/light theme with semantic colors. After it's a smooth sail (sort of, routing, forms, state ownership and persistent url state are still an alien concept for clankers).

My clanker made my vanilla css with branding color variables. shrug.

Did your clanker reach 40k CLOC?

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#408

Post by porker »

esskay wrote: post #275
mrsilencedogood wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 irrelevan…

Spot on.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#409

Post by onion2k »

what wrote: post #381
onion2k wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be. Arguably many websites and apps desperately need a good component library because it's very clear the UI sucks without one. Lots of people spending a few thousand dollars on their UX is not unreasonable at all , so the best-in-class library (whether that's Tailwind is a separate point) should be able to make a…

The pain point tailwind supposedly solves is that people who are supposed to be front end web developers don’t understand CSS.

I don't agree with the other commenter. The point you make is a fair one.

However, I think the real information in your comment is that there are people making websites and web apps who aren't frontend developers. They're likely fullstack who are much more backend focused, and who do the frontend more out of necessesity than enjoyment. Tailwind enables those people who aren't experts in frontend to make things for the web without the necessary expertise to write CSS themselves.

That's why it's valuable - the point of Tailwind is that it solve the pain point (not knowing CSS) with money instead of time. But now people can solve it with AI instead.

This is a poor analogy, but maybe we should consider CSS as a lower level language than Tailwind, similar to JVM bytecode to Java. There are plenty of people who will tell you that a real Java developer understands the bytecode, but that doesn't stop people writing code in Java without knowing the lower level.

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