The Synology End Game

The year is 2025. Delivering a good product is not considered profitable enough anymore. If a company or product is beloved by customers then that means it doesn't squeeze them to the max. This is clearly money left on the table that someone will sooner or later extract. High-end brands are not exempt from this.

It’s not a lot of money left on the table though, the lion’s share of it has already been taken.

Easily explained: when times are tough, delivering growth naturally is hard. Squeezing the customer is the lowest hanging fruit.

Sure, long term reputation is severely damaged, but why would decision makers care? Product owners interests are not aligned with interests of the company itself. Squeeze the customer, get your miniscule growth, call it "unlocking value", get your bonus, slap it onto your resume and move on to the next company. Repeat until retirement.

Yes, but that doesn’t stop companies from putting a disproportionate amount of effort into squeezing it out, instead of directing that effort towards developing better products.

Everyone is grabbing what they can in hopes of riding out the coming collapse. Providing a good product is little benefit in the face of looming economic disaster, ie. "the great reset". The fall of the west will be a bumpy ride, good product or not.

> Delivering a good product is not considered profitable enough

Leaving products and commerce coupled is not considered good practice anymore. It's recommended in some places that you outsource so extremely to the point that your outsourced labor render services to receiving outsourced labor. And that's not considered insane.

I guess times have been tough for a long damn while then…

My 10 year old NAS is a testament to how much money they have left on the table; they could 3x revenue and profits by simply breaking it every few years.

Is NAS a growth market at all anymore? My somewhat unexamined opinion is that most folks can and probably do just store everything in the cloud.

I would not be surprised to find out that Synology is seeing a smaller market year over year and becoming desperate to find new revenue per person who is shopping for a NAS today.

It’s not necessary a growth market, but you do get repeat customers (either as hardware ages or when we want to expand our storage).

I’m in the latter group but Synology has locked themselves out of the market with this choice.

Uploading terabytes of content to the consumer cloud just isn’t practical, financially.

I extended the lifecycle of my 2013 vintage x64 QNAP (which lost support status around 2018 or 2019) by installing Ubuntu directly. The QNAP “firmware” was just an internal USB flash drive (DOM) that lived on a header that contained QNAP’s custom distro. There was a fully-featured standard UEFI that allows booting from the SATA devices.

I learned a lot in the process, but most important is that the special sauce NAS makers purport is usually years behind current versions.

The NAS finally bit the dust last year because of a design defect associated with Bay Trail systems that’s not limited to QNAP.

Isn't the conventional wisdom "at least 2 backups, one offsite"? My lab gets by with 2 copies for most of our data: one on our Synology NAS and one mirrored to Box.

With the size of data we're dealing with, loading everything from cloud all the time would slow analyses down to a crawl. The Synology is networked with 10G Ethernet to most of our workstations.

When times are tough, accept less growth (or sometimes none) so that when times get good again or someone builds a competitor, all your customers don't leave you.

The real big brain move is to be your own competitor, so you extract value from customers either way. If they don't switch, you get to extract value via planned obsolescence and plain old extortion. If they do switch to avoid the extortion, you at least get to keep the price of their new NAS, and you weren't likely to get the extortion money anyway.

America has thousands of food brands but they're all owned by about 6 companies.

This is more about EBITDA.

Serving the needs of customers (practically the quality of the product) sits down in the list of importance. Sales strategy, marketing, PR, organizational culture, company values, ..., basically the self-serving measures come all before that.

Our organization joined this trend some years ago. The original founders (did ca. 30-35 years ago) passed 60 and cashing out. Sold the company to an investor. Small fish, <100 employee, but in a niche of engineering app development with long time clients, very long time clients. Since then, we are a self declared sales oriented organization, company meetings are about success stories of billing more for the same service, monthly cash-flow analysis (target vs. actual), new marketing materials disseminated broadly, sales campaign, organizational culture, teamwork, HR. Every other has a technical development footnote, all AI (fits right in like designer bags at a pig farm). No QA, none.

From Wikipedia, the Synology founders are still involved in the company’s leadership.

Sounds like they're only missing an epiphany about offshoring the engineering!

This is depressing, but feels accurate. How do we collectively get out of this mess?

Don’t give them money.

Capitalism. It’s why we can’t have nice things.

Capitalism is the reason we have so many nice things. :)

this... it's the only reason technology has advanced so quickly

I think there's actually no point in being profitable, it always seems to lead to even more greed, power and corruption.

Better to have a heart, care more about your customers, don't put profits first, but still make enough to keep the lights on.

I think that would make everyone happier anyways.

Since engineering is a "cost center", that must be decreased, it is a potential scenario, yes.

The other is to fuck engineering. Sell what we currently have, until we can, as expensive as we can, and do not spend on engineering. That is only taking away the money! Can put on some AI glitter to dazzle, but that's it. No one knows what AI is in this narrow field anyway, we can position ourself as revolutionary inventors for anything weird or new. Some will eat up this s*t for sure. Short term is paramount!