[osivertsson]

When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale.

Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work is gone.

My guess is they will continue to lose the most valuable employees unless they replace management with some internally well-respected staff that understands their customers well.

[jacquesm]

What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive this in the longer term, regardless of the reversal they've shown they do not have their customers interests at heart at all. It's dumber that it even seems: they were raking in a substantial amount of money precisely because of this one factor, and they pretty much shot the goose that was laying the golden eggs.

I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.

[Aurornis]

> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical

Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated.

The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave, and that the customers weren’t smart enough to recognize that the artificial restrictions had no real basis in reality.

I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved it. “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember.

Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard. Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with Synology.

Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me.

[cm2187]

I don’t know if their brand is that great. I have been using synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to use, but the hardware is expensive, non customizable, the underlying OS is based on an ancient linux kernel. I have now run into the volume size limits (200TB) and disk sizes keep increasing exponentially. And they don’t support enterprise SSDs (SAS/U.2).

So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many people in a similar state of mind.

[seanalltogether]

They've also been pretty hostile around video transcoding which seems like a baffling position to take given their audience. I still have an older tv that can't deal with h.265 and I'm refusing to upgrade to the latest version of synology OS because they remove the transcoders.

[ddtaylor]

> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical

They probably used bad data to make the decision. They probably thought they had accurate and high quality information that led them to believe nobody cared about this. My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge margins on vendor lock-in drives.

[mikepurvis]

I had one of their entry-level consumer products years ago, and it was okay, but the photo management app was basically unusable on the anemic CPU it came with— it would spend multiple days grinding away trying to generate thumbnails for a few gigs of digital photos.

After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare.

I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS, CoreOS, Talos, etc.

[slowmovintarget]

I went with a UGreen NAS a couple of months ago specifically because Synology had added this restriction. It's been a happy decision so far.

When reading up and watching videos for what I should get, everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS products." But everything I looked at showed they were coasting on their status and had actively worsened their products in recent revs.

[markstos]

AND they haven't publicly admitted they made a mistake yet, either. That would be another missed opportunity to correct their course.

[raintrees]

I hope Synology gets its act together, it has been a convenient product to resell for clients who down-size. Very simple, very low maintenance. And very simple to set up, versus all of the home-grown *nix boxes I have built over the decades.

[coldtea]

>What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical

As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make

[Xss3]

I was almost ready to pull the trigger on a few grand of their stuff when the bombshell drooped. Am going with Ubiquiti now.

[edem]

What are the alternatives that you are considering?

[reactordev]

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…

[rickdeckard]

While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".

I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...

[chrbr]

I know nothing about the reasoning behind the original decision from Synology, nor the internal politics at play, but typically the customer support tail is not wagging the dog of the rest of the company. Might be bias/anecdata from the places I've worked, but product usually drives everything, and the support staff has to deal with the consequences.

[yason]

> Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject > support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".

All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."

[WmWsjA6B29B4nfk]

Certainly has nothing to do with "official" drives being crazily overpriced.

[GolfPopper]

That's true, but there's a pretty big difference between 'ban' and 'unsupported'. It's entirely possible to do the latter without doing the former. Synology actively and painfully punished its customers who didn't use its own drives, deliberately degrading their experience in order to try and force them to buy more of Synology's own drives.

Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome, business decision. But Synology's ban was a deliberate attack on their own customers, for Synology's own profit.

[cyanydeez]

This was greenlit as a cash grab first, justify support later.

They wanted a vertical ecosystem of expensive drives.

If Synology drives had the same or limited price points as third party, sure. But Synology was charging Apple level prices.

[glenstein]

They could also oppose the change simply out of a belief in what's best for the customers, and an ethos of hardware compatibility. It would represent no change to their burden to continue the company's long-standing policy.

[lupusreal]

Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically soulless already; they care more about their own immediate convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about the human being on the other end of the phone line.

Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.

[teekert]

I think stuff like this can be countered, but it would require a step in the other direction, becoming more open, ie open source some important component (or make ssh work normally?). Show that you do really listen. Repent.

It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free". So that's more in-touch.

I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys. Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key. I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call actually.)

[stirfish]

What if you were to run your guest ssh in a container with the relevant volumes attached? I can't recall how the base ssh works with Synology DSM, but everything interesting I do with my NAS is done with containers.

[anal_reactor]

I've realized that at my current workplace it's a recurring theme that I suggest a solution, it gets rejected, we circle around for a year, finally we go back to my solution. It is indeed extremely demotivating, because it gives me an impression that I'm working with stupid people. I don't want to leave the company, but I'll try to switch teams next year.

[GrumpyGoblin]

At my company there is a team like this who are solely responsible for a significant piece of internal infrastructure.

People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.

Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.

They're a fun bunch.

[hsjsjdnbdbdb]

Sounds like you don't argue hard enough

[asdff]

Synology's days are numbered imo. Their userbase exists at a careful precipice of people who are technically inclined to understand the importance of a NAS vs cloud hosting solutions, but not so technically inclined to build their own NAS. This can't be a very deep market. You can only really have marketing chase the less inclined of these who are still on cloud services and hoping to educate them that the cloud services are really bad afterall, despite the conveniences of the walled garden you have to educate to the point where they leave that garden. Educating a less technically inclined populace towards technical merits is one of the most difficult tasks in marketing. You also can't really market to the people who are building their own NAS because they will just see the spec sheet for what it is, and see synology hardware stack is nothing special and is in fact quite marked up and not very performant to begin with.

And while this doomed business is existing, something new emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100 nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of people building their own nas and showing how they did it.

Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.

[devjab]

I think you may be underestimating the amount of people who would buy the easy sollution. I've been part of a makerspace where we've tinkered with 3D printers since before it was cool. I still have a Bambu Lab printer myself because it's the "iPhone" of 3D printers that just works out of the box. I used to have a Linux laptop and now I have a MacBook because it's easy.

If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS because it was easy. Though I don't think your prediction for Synology is wrong. I'd certainly pick the one that didn't previously try to push their own HDD's.

[potato3732842]

I think it speaks volumes about the work ethic (or less charitably, moral character) of the HN comment section that so many people are bewildered as to why support would prefer to troubleshoot questionable hardware than tell people "fuck off and come back with supported hardware" all day. Unless you're a real POS doing that sort of work sucks way worse than actually working to solve people's problems even if the latter requires a few more brain cells. And it only takes the most casual contact with the support people in your organization to understand this. If the people answering phones and chats didn't actually want to solve people's problems they could make more money working at the DMV counter or selling time shares or whatever. The people this decision is bad for are the engineers who have to work marginally harder to write more robust code to work with hardware they can't necessarily get hands on in advance to test with.

[mixermachine]

We are talking about run-of-the-mill HDDs here with SATA 3 (2005) and SMART (<2000) interface. No product is perfect but these interfaces are very well tested and billions of machines run as expected with them. The move from them was purely for money reasons.

[CryptoBanker]

Open source alternatives such as OpenMediaVault are able to support virtually any hardware. That's no excuse for a company like Synology

[flkiwi]

Are you saying Synology’s move to support first party drives was a good thing? Plenty of companies deal with unpredictable hardware and, in fact, Synology has for years, in part thanks to standards.

[ChrisRR]

There are way too many companies where higher ups and marketing will refuse to listen to the engineers about what people actually like about their products.

See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into software that doesn't need it

[INTPenis]

Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the internal support people would fight a decision like only allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?

[glenstein]

My read is that they don't have inside info and are guessing.

[newsclues]

Because trying to explain stupid decisions is annoying and listening to endless complaints is demoralizing.

Source: worked AppleCare

[m000]

A tiny bit easier, at the risk of reducing the profitability of the company, which could mean losing their jobs.

[vladvasiliu]

I don't know about Synology, don't know anyone there, but in my case I do this kind of thing out of principle.

Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.

In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about their NAS not working without first checking that it's actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work in infrastructure, and some people were installing something that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.

[behnamoh]

I'm curious, do you know of examples of companies that lost their best engineers despite reversing course on a shitty policy?

My understanding is that people want to pay the bills, and esp. in this economy, most prefer to have a job rather than searching for a new one. That ofc is different for the more senior engineers who are in demand, but the junior ones will probably still stick around despite the management's policies.

[makeitdouble]

There is a time span between the policy is comitted internally and the time that policy is reverted. In Synology's case it's probably more than half a year, in other companies it could take a full year or more to reverse course.

Half a year is plenty enough to move away.

Of course people don't like looking for a new job, but they don't like shitty leadership either. And speaking of paying the bills, you won't get much of a bonus or promotion when profits are plunging, so moving away earlier than later is usually a good idea.

[luca4]

Yes and choosing a NAS brand is not something you change your mind like switching an android phone brand after 2-3years. This will stick quite a bit.

[kstrauser]

Yep. I’d already started moving things out of Docker on my DS923+ and onto RaspberryPis, of all things, which are perfectly powerful for my needs. Synology’s police shoved me toward planning and implementing alternatives as I vowed never, ever, to spend a penny on such a locked down device. It’s going to be hard for them to un-ring that bell.

In a few years, when it’s time to replace this NAS, if they’ve demonstrated that they’re serious about doing right by their customers, I may replace it with another Synology. And if not, I’ll have already migrated my services off it such that I’ll only need a “dumb” NAS and can choose from any of their competitors.

[PaulKeeble]

A bad reputation never goes away either. Trust once lost is not something that returns easily. Some customers might forgive a company but many wont and any business willing to be this scummy will almost certainly do something else (or the same thing again in a few years).

[setgree]

"That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years" is a strong argument against giving a company your "everything." They'll cut you loose in a minute.

[ec109685]

Horowitz talks about this in-depth in “What you do is Who You Are.” There are waypoints in a company’s life that can change their trajectory and when you have the weight of employees, their family and company’s existence on your shoulders, it’s easy to compromise on a value like customer centricity. Your culture needs to be strong enough so that doesn’t happen.

https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/

[bonoboTP]

This is a quite competitive market, far from monopolies. So let them do what their incentives and company culture lead them to. The reality is that often such leaders can come out net positive on a personal level even if they drive the company to the ground because they extracted out everything in a short term ("eating the seed corn"), then will go somewhere else. But at least the company and its products disappear. It's evolution. It's not always better to save them by being some kind of internal hero.

[mihaaly]

I also believe that this peek into the mentality of the organization leadership makes doubt in customers if the organization can be trusted again. I, personally, will think more than twice before choosing them again. This will be several years of recovery for the reputation, if it ever happens at all. Synology is in the box called 'squeezing cutomers for money' and the customer has no incentive to spend any time or money to test if the classification is still valid. Will stay there, despite this step. There is doubt that they changed their way of thinking. They only reacted to the repercussion to THIS specific action of theirs, that became measurably very bad for THEM. It was not like they revised their action after the outcry, no. They had to bleed, they want to stop THEIR bleeding, not making it good again for the customer. benefit for the remaining customers is just a coincidence here. I am not hopeful for their change of mentality. Which could be something disappointing to hear for faithful employees.

[mguerville]

Very true, and also users aren't naive, it just signals that the greed factor is now winning over the pride into the product and it's the end of the product line as a truly DIY platform. I expect they'll wait a few months then find another way to achieve the same goal, like gating some features to NASes with official HDD only, or throttling 3rd party I/O

[alphazard]

This is why it's so important to track dissenting opinions before a decision is made and before the consequences are revealed. Were I an investor in Synology I would be calling for some people to lose their job over being this wrong when the right answer was easily accessible. There's probably some people who got this right who could take a shot at running things, but you can't know without having the dissenting opinions in writing ahead of time.

[liquid_thyme]

Lock-in actually helps internal development. If you're targeting fixed hardware, writing software gets a lot easier.

Your "guess" is not logical.

[pfexec]

Would you say the same thing about Apple?

The "replaceable" SSD in the M4 Mac Mini is proprietary and will not accept a standard M.2 module. This was a deliberate choice.

Assuming you locate an exact match, you need a second, working, Mac to provision it.

The entire process is user-hostile from start to finish yet the criticism is few (and I've even read praise of this practice on Mac fan sites).

[thoroughburro]

Synology has equivalent competition. Apple doesn’t.

[dheera]

Because if you say something bad about Apple you get downvoted to oblivion.

[dstroot]

In my experience the secondary effect on morale from the leadership who did this not being impacted or punished is even worse. My experience is that employees would love to see leadership held accountable (as the employees are) and morale rebounds. If leadership is not held accountable it’s much worse for morale.

[add-sub-mul-div]

> it also severely impacts internal morale.

I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset me in both my role as a player and as an employee.

The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.

[supportengineer]

If their branded hard drives are so good, they needn't be afraid of their customers having a choice.

If the customer choose to use cheap hard drives and encounter problems, that's on them.

Sometimes you have to allow people the freedom to feel the pain. Once they feel the pain, they will be motivated to make change.

[ponooqjoqo]

We shouldn't normalize referring to managers as leaders. Leadership didn't make this decision, management did.

High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.

[dheera]

The ship has sailed. I'm eyeing the Unifi UNAS 8 which ships this month.

[taneq]

Is this not the norm in any mid-to-large company that makes a bad decision (or even a decision that’s seen to be bad)? In my experience internal morale often suffers before the customers catch on.

[OptionOfT]

This really feels like they hired a study from one of the big 3 and this the recommendation they came up with.

[DerpHerpington]

It's this level of out of touch with their market that gives me zero faith in them as a brand. They also killed their Videostation product, that was downloaded over 66 million times according to their package manager, rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders. All they have done over the past few years is remove features, add more vendor lock in, and be tone deaf to their market. They deserve their own downfall, utter corporate stupidity.

[devilbunny]

> killed their Videostation product ... rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders

YES, yes, a million times yes.

Footgun, own goal, whatever term you like: if your "prosumer" products are essentially teasers to get the people who select the commercial products familiar with your brand, decisions like killing Videostation and banning non-Syno HDDs are not putting your best foot forward.

[varispeed]

> That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years.

People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder, never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment spreadsheet says no.

[rzwitserloot]

It's an interesting lesson.

I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where:

* This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a ridiculous cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for the exit'.

* ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the process is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I think it's a bit misguided, but there is an explanation available that has little to with 'cash grab / enshittification' principles.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it.

So they still messed up, and the damage is now done.

If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive.

But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.

[gosub100]

To me it's obvious why they initially chose to use validated hardware:

1) the unlabelled SMR debacle a few years ago probably wasted untold amounts of time and caused unwarranted damage to their brand from frustrated people who just paid $1k for their Synology, $1k for drives, and then couldn't build a working array with them, possibly even losing data and productivity in the process.

2) penny pinching cheapskates buying broken hdds on the used market and complaining that "their Synology doesn't work". Or swapping failed drives with garbage and again wasting time of support.

3) they are premium products, not intended for the hobbyist. Their customers generally are willing to spend more in exchange for a premium experience. In order to provide this, especially to less tech savvy people (you know, people who want to actually USE their NAS instead of just tinker with it every day), it made sense to control the quality of the drives.

However the Internet peanut gallery has been so used to being exploited that their scam detectors falsely activated and they all swarmed out of their (neckbeard) nests. So synology has no option than to backtrack and offer free tech support for the bottom quartile of "knows just enough to break it" techies.

[kapone]

The damage is indeed done. If they wanted to do it the right way, they should have offered Synology branded HDDs (from whatever upstream vendor) AT COST to their customers.

See the problem there...?