In B2C that's a legal warranty-issue in many countries, because if the product didn't provide the advertised core-functionality the customer has the right for a full refund of the purchase price (within the EU for a period of 24 months!)

"Why didn't you put that in the patch notes?"

Because you wouldn't read it anyway.

</OT>

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."

Typically you'd want to tier it out

1. Fully supported drives: Synology branded

2. Support provided: Somewhat decent tested models that meet x features

3. Unsupported but works: list of drives

4. Does not work: list of drives.

There is no shortage of models of drives that do crappy crap that totally suck completely. Like lie about things going wrong in the drive. Or take a long break when dealing with failed sectors. Putting down a list of well supported drives is a must in that market. This said, only supporting branded drives sucks.

Exactly. And they typically help you with issues even if you do use third-party components.

> Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours.

That's not really how it works. If I have tried 5 third-party USB-C chargers of different brands, and they all charge all other USB-C devices perfectly but not my phone, my phone vendor will hopefully be more helpful than "sorry, can't help you, you've only tried with third-party chargers".

Not if they follow yason's guidance of:

> 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."

---

Whenever there's a reason to suspect a drive issue, Synology's support should obviously ask you to verify that your drives are good. Maybe provide a drive testing feature in the Synology software which tests for common failure modes. Maybe ask you to try connecting the drives to other machines. Maybe try to put in another drive. That's fine.

But a blanket policy of "we won't help you unless you test with our branded drives" is what I'm arguing against.

"The official drives have a MTBF which is X longer which saves you Y amount of time and Z dollars, but the choice and the risk is up to you."

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.

I'm just stating that from my experience it is unlikely that especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision, it would more likely be R&D, Product or Sales.

Not to throw shades at Customer support at all. They are the ones dealing with the pressure of fast resolution time per case vs. large complexity to identify root-causes across different HDD-vendors, it's reasonable that they highlighted the difficulty here and someone thought he found the "silver bullet"...

Post sales, the feedback comes from customers.

Pre-sales, it might be heard from sales.

R&D and Product might not get real world input or feedback as directly as the actual paying customers.

Maybe it's just me.

As a life long customer support person I disagree.

Customer support would 100% complain about this as they get to deal with pissed customers that have a completely good, decent manufacture drive that won't work and you are the anvil of which they will beat their hammer upon. R&D/Product are much more separated from the pissed customers. Support is the first group that gets beat by issues like this, followed by sales.

But it actually is: because sales must keep growing, so the support burden typically increases linearly - while hiring does not, more often than not.

I've seen this at a few companies now:

* CS teams get built, delivers great support

* sales increase (partially thanks to that support, but there is no way to show it with metrics)

* hiring in CS does not keep pace (because it's largely seen as a cost centre)

* CS teams get overwhelmed and look for ways to downscale per-customer effort.

That's why some big names have literally declared support bankruptcy and just don't provide almost any support (google, amazon...).

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.

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.

Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams “It doesn’t matter what I think. If I break the policy it gets me in trouble even if you make a big sale because of it. If you can get my boss or someone up the chain to tell me to do what you’re asking then I’d be happy to do what you’re asking.”

That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for their effort and one thing they came back with was a metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.

Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than other HDDs, but the price already includes possible support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.

Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C they cannot charge for support required to just provide the advertised core function of the product...

If you empower customer service to actually provide service, they will. Shitty service isn't because of shitty reps, it's shitty incentive structures. They're not trying to cut down on support effort because they want to play solitaire, they're doing it because serving too many customers with difficult problems will literally impoverish them.