They can only make a profit if people are willing to buy what they're selling
> Their business is selling hard drives.
Then either they or you are confused. They make the NAS, not the drives. The drives are interchangeable and upgradable, that's the whole point of a hot-swap NAS system.
> I bet a large portion of profits come from that
I think they wanted a large portion of profits to come from that, but most NAS purchasers know that hard drives are a commodity/standardized and won't pay a premium for ... no benefit.
> most NAS purchasers know that hard drives are a commodity/standardized and won't pay a premium for ... no benefit.
Also, some will deliberately mix drives from various manufacturers to reduce exposure to potential “bad batch” problems where multiple drives fail in a short space of time (possibly extra failures while rebuilding an array after the first failure, rendering the whole array untrustworthy or entirely broken). This is not possible if you can only purchase from one manufacturer.
> Then either they or you are confused. They make the NAS, not the drives.
No you are. You don't have to make something in order to sell it. Composing materials is a business. Selling packages is a business.
You may choose to make your own bundles at home, some don't have the time and/or skill to do so.
You're acting like this isn't normal business administration: companies push products, companies adjust offerings depending on demand. Ask Oracle how they're still in business and raking in billions.
> You may choose to make your own bundles at home, some don't have the time and/or skill to do so.
Well clearly enough of Synologys customers decided they did have the time to buy commodity HDDs and slap them into a competitors product, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
As GP said, Synology may want to believe they’re in the business of selling premium priced HDDs, with a side salad of NASs. But it turns out that isn’t a very sustainable business, otherwise there would be no reason for them change their policies.
Correct. I never said that it was the right choice, I just said that it was a valid choice for them to make. Lots of companies substantially raise prices and still come up winning.
Netflix doubled their subscription cost since 2008, but market cap did 100x and subscribers are 30x. They even offer fewer good movies than they used to. You may still hate them, but their wallets don't care about your feelings.
Companies should create value, and capture a fraction of that value.
What Synology did was trying to significantly increase the fraction of value they captured, at the cost of their customers, who would have to pay that, and without providing extra value for their customers.
This is not only a a bad deal for customers, it also triggers our sense of injustice.
The best companies create value, and capture only a part of it, and leave other parts of the value for both customers and partners/suppliers.
I don’t think that’s true. They apparently thought that was their business, but it’s not what their customers think it is. And having that much of a mismatch between what you think you’re selling and what everyone else thinks you’re selling often ends very badly.
For example, Kodak thought they were in the business of selling film. Their customers thought they were a company that sold ways to take photos. Kodak ignored what their customers wanted, the ability to take photos easily, in favor of their desire to sell more film. That cost them dearly when digital cameras took over.
Their business is selling NASes. They don't make special hard drives that no one else makes. Anyone can sell hard drives. Their value in their business is the NAS, not the drives. If they can't survive on their NAS without scamming their customers with marked up hard drives, then they're not really a viable business.
Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.