While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy …

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.

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.

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.

> 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."

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 helpi…

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.