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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

241–250 of 407 posts

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#242
post #15

They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind. I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a bette…

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

A bold claim

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#243
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.

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.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#244
Tailwind has always sucked, and I hope this is the beginning of the end for this stupid library. Web designers universally agreed that utility class names are a bad design choice, and then Adam W, who probably never bothered to understand CSS, made quite possibly the most over engineered CSS wrapper of all time. Bad. For. Everyone. Use. CSS. Modules.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#245

Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers. Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water. I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, fro…

Precisely this.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#246

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.

>inb4 my 1:1 naive mapping of DB to screen works for me

>inb4 the web should be reserved for text documents and hyperlinks and user styles rule and running anything close to applications on the web was a mistake

>inb4 TUI

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#248
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.…

StyleX, on the other hand, has an explicit LLM Resources endpoint: https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#249
post #232

I'm happy to hear that because their business model of selling ready available components is pretty much dead due to AI. Shopify gets to control a large portion of the CSS UI market that AI so eagerly generates. Good for them

And based on Tailwind’s previous statements about AI impact on them and their business, it’s possible Shopify got a good deal.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#250
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…

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.

I think this is reasonable but incorrect. Tailwind didn't say "our conversion rates went down." They said the traffic to their docs site went down.

Their funnel depended on SEO, and LLMs took SEO out of the equation. What you said about the value of pre-built components might also be true but can't be determined from a situation where consumers suddenly all stopped learning that the pre-built components exist. Occam's Razor says it's the funnel.

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