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 visit the website, so it’s not like it’s being used less.
If you think about it, the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything. That’s just my 2 cents as a guy who used to look up their docs constantly to confirm a pattern I was implementing, as tailwind classes were never really as self-evident as tailwind labs liked to believe they were IMO.
Like it just doesn’t make total sense to me to compare library documentation traffic hits to traffic hits that happen in other industries here, or with other products or companies. They aren’t even a traditional SaaS company, not that there really Is one either. Their service or income flow is defined by things like offering Enterprise support or a component library at a premium — things that aren’t simply dictated by or shown through documentation traffic trends; things that were encroached upon by plenty of other things besides AI.
> 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 side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.
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.
Yes. Maybe their business model was never sustainable and now they are unfairly blaming IA as a scapegoat to justify layoffs.
I think their business model was sustainable, but depended on SEO. AI made it so people would either use the LLM generated tailwind syntax, or the "AI Overview" at the top of the Google search results and never land on the official tailwind documentation site. Less visits on the official docs meant less people would see the paid offerings, which means less people would buy.
It's possible they could have explored other marketing channels (youtube?), but it seems like the death of SEO for this sort of content lead to the main issues.
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.
Spot on.
If nothing else, it definitively proves AI produces real value.
I hear the contrary a lot but Im not convinced anyone actually believes it.
In the long term, no business model is sustainable.
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.
> the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything
I've heard this before, but it's really no different than vanilla CSS. My guess is that people started pointing this out is that Tailwind got more non-frontend people digging into styling more where they were hit with how much shit there is in CSS.
> it's really no different than vanilla CSS
Is this supposed to be a plus? When you have indirections they're supposed to provide some abstraction and the abstraction might or might not provide the utilities you desire, but there is a point to it. A near 1:1 mapping is completely useless and just a different syntax for the sake of it.
For me I know CSS quite well, but I would always have to look up some utility names that had no intuitive mapping. line-height is leading, flex-direction has no direct mapping, text-wrap is text but also font size is text, so if trying to do font-size:custom you had to do some weird syntax unlike the other custom value syntax lest it confuse text-[1rem] with a text-wrap rule. There are a lot of these weird decisions.
I love tailwind and will continue to use it, but it isn't perfect in this regard...
All good points. To be clear, though, I wasn't trying to insinuate that Tailwind has NO design smells.
I also like Tailwind, though I don't really use it anymore.