(~30 years)
Our mission is to enable developers, of any level, to build UIs that feel amazing and to build faster.
Why? At MUI, we are builders at heart, we love the craft. We believe UIs are important, and we don't accept the status quo. So we have to push boundaries because no one else will.
Developers will always want to get their job done faster, from creating basic websites to complex applications. At the same time, the pace at which businesses need to digitalize & automate processes increases. Frontend is an opportunity for businesses to differentiate.
At a personal level, our CEO @Olivier Tassinari gets quickly frustrated when the interface of a service he uses is poorly executed, especially when there are avoidable friction points. He gets a lot of satisfaction in helping deliver better product experiences for end-users, in the hope that the next time he uses that service, he will have a great product experience. Working on MUI is about going after the root cause.
How? To achieve it, we need to answer this question:
How can we build innovative tools for UI development teams so they can differentiate their products with their front-end experience?
Part of the answer for MUI is to empower developers to build faster, to focus heavily on design execution, and to lower the barrier to entry for new developers.
A great drive for engineers to join MUI is when their management prevents them from going the extra mile and they are frustrated by it.
Our vision is to deliver a unified UI creation ecosystem for web developers.
We want to create an ecosystem close to Qt.io but for the web and one that is not perceived/marketed as a big monolith.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, you can find Tiugo Technologies unifying CKEditor, TinyMCE, and Uploadcare, but those are isolated products, we believe there should be an ecosystem that solves those problems better by being more integrated.
Why? This ecosystem needs to exist to raise the bar for what a great UX on the web is and the speed of creating UI. The problems with today’s ecosystem. It sucks:
Commercial solutions that got stuck in the past. They don’t appreciate the value of open source, e.g. Highcharts. Or forgot about it, e.g. Kendo UI.
Open core solutions sold to Private equity and make moves to seek to extract the maximum value, e.g. TinyMCE v7 MIT revert.
Open source solutions missing the sustainability piece, e.g. Radix, Mantine.
Solutions too focused on their niche, e.g. AG, Tiptap, Tailwind. Without unification, they can’t build important features.
Examples of integration of features that only we, MUI, can do because we build the whole stack: