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Comment by leakycap | Hacker News Reader

> Companies exist to make profit.

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.

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> > Their business is selling hard drives.

> 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.

> it turns out

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.

> I just said that it was a valid choice for them to make

Valid means well grounded - read this thread, it was not a well-grounded decision

Valid means producing the desired outcome or effective - if this was the case, they would not be rolling it back

> 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.

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