I hadn’t really decided what I would do if my Synology dies.
I was less mad than most people about the, now reversed, decision to only permit first party hard drives.
I have no immediate purchase decisions in front of me. And Synology’s hardware generally was moving away from what I wanted– a big box that could play media in its native format over ethernet to my AppleTV. I just figured when/if my current NAS died or showed signs of dying, I’d price and feature compare and make my decision.
For some reason, the reversal of their “first party hard drive only” decision makes me feel different. It’s not that I ever really thought there was a reason other than greed to restrict their NAS products to first party drives. I think it’s more that this reversal, after widespread customer backlash, emphasizes for me that this was pointless.
When a company makes it clear that it’s out of touch with me as a customer, it’s hard to make a long term investment in that company.
I build B2B software for a living. I have had the experience of offering someone a tool that was less full featured today than a competitor, but have them buy our tools anyway. It was always because they felt that my company understood their problems, understood what they were trying to accomplish, cared about those things, and were dedicated to working toward solutions– not for them as individuals necessarily, but for people who do the work they do. When you’re investing in critical systems you plan to use for years, values alignment, understanding and empathy– these things matter. The trajectory of the products matters as much as the current state.
Failing to make larger storage devices with CPUs that have hardware accelerated media encoders was kind of strike one. I don’t just want pools of storage, I want a server with memory to run services and I want media playback. First-party only hard drives, with no real explanation or discernible advantages, that was kind of strike 2. Both of these are cases that I could brush off as “serving some other set of customers who are not me, but maybe I’m not really forgotten”.
But strike 3 seems to be reversing their decision due to backlash after a year of bad sales. This doesn’t feel like wanting me to be their customer– it feels like reluctantly finding out I am their customer.