The same goes for Synology. Under a decent and sane system of tech regulation, Synology's move to take away support for the vast majority of hard drives ever manufactured would prompt some other manufacturer to leap into the market and restore that support, by making alternative software for Synology's products.

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That represents a huge potential risk to Synology - once you're running a rival's software on your Synology product, it's a short leap to buying your *next* product from the company that saved your ass.

But because that kind of reverse-engineering is banned, enshittifiying companies like Synology don't have to worry about that kind of usurpation. They can enlist the justice system to destroy any company that tries to rescue us from their predatory behavior.

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That leaves us with comparatively weak defenses against enshittification, like complaining in public, and/or buying someone else's products. These are *much* weaker than responses like "having a regulator fine Synology a zillion dollars for screwing us" or "having a rival company sell us a tool to disenshittify the product we already have."

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Sometimes, though, those weaker measures really work. The hard drives that go in Synology's devices are fully standardized, and the data you store on them is *far* more valuable than the box you put them in. People in the market for a new NAS box can mix and match *any* hard drive with *any* NAS enclosure...*except* Synology's.

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That's a huge commercial disadvantage for Synology, and the fact that you can throw away your Synology box and keep your drives, and that any drive will work with any product *except* Synology, means that people really *were* able to vote with their wallets. After a *catastrophic* drop in sales, Synology pushed another software update that restored its support for every kind of drive.

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Of course, *no one should ever buy a Synology product again*. They have shown us what they do when they have power over you and no one should ever give them any power over their economic future.

Remember, for enshittification to work, the company has to have locked in its users and/or business customers. Making things worse without some kind of lock-in simply precipitates a mass departure.

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Contrast Synology' story with Chamberlain's. Chamberlain is a private equity-backed monopolist, a garage door-opener company that bought all the other garage door-opener companies, and then withdrew support for Homekit, a standardized way for apps to connect to home automation systems (like garage door-openers):

pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lea…

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When Chamberlain nuked Homekit support, they forced every owner of every Chamberlain garage door-opener (which is basically *all* garage door-openers) to switch to using Chamberlain's app to open and close their garages, and now every time you open your garage, you have to look at seven ads.

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Where Synology customers found it easy to switch vendors, Chamberlain customers are pretty stuck. Partly, that's because Chamberlain owns all the competing brands, so they are all defective in the same way. But also, it's because garage door-openers have to be installed, generally by a professional, and switching openers is an expensive, logistically complex operation.

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Of course, Chamberlain's app - like all apps - is off-limits to rival companies that might reverse engineer it to block its apps, thanks to the anticircumvention law's prohibition on reverse-engineering closed systems. Chamberlain's openers are also closed systems, which prevents rivals from reverse-engineering *them* and restoring Homekit integration.

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