[baobun]

The printer market is a cartel with everyone pulling the same bullshit. DIYing an affordable and performant printer is out of reach for the individual. Printer ink is not a commodity otherwise. Consumers don't really have alternatives.

Desktop NAS market is very different.

[lobsterthief]

I don’t think it’s a cartel per se; that would require collusion to keep ink prices high.

What seems to have happened with the 2D printer market is a race to the bottom to provide customers with the cheapest printers possible while hiding the high [recouped] costs of the ink. Many consumers are duped into buying a cheap printer and not realizing the high cost of printing that comes with it.

This is why brands like Brother have been able to succeed, especially pushing their laser printers: higher upfront hardware cost and cheaper ink.

[rcxdude]

You can do things like ink tank modifications and so on (I think there's even a few you can buy off the shelf with that option now), they're just rarely worthwhile unless you're doing quite a lot of printing.

[nicce]

> Desktop NAS market is very different.

This was the first step or attempt to change that.

[rcxdude]

The thing is, you can't set up a cartel unilaterally. For this to work, they would need to get not only the other NAS appliance manufacturers on board (who clearly didn't and happily took the business that they were losing), but basically the whole PC and server hardware market.

(I think some comments elsewhere in the chain got it right: they were calculating that they had enough brand lock-in and non-technical buyers who would not have much choice, as opposed to a largely technical userbase who could set up any number of options but were choosing them because they were both reasonable value and low maintenance)

[nicce]

> The thing is, you can't set up a cartel unilaterally. For this to work, they would need to get not only the other NAS appliance manufacturers on board (who clearly didn't and happily took the business that they were losing), but basically the whole PC and server hardware market.

I understand the point, but HP's approach was not really based on cartel, while it might seem so.

In the beginning, HP had great printers, and they used specific kind of ink. Back in that time, ink wasn't so complicated, so other manufactures started to sell it as well. So there was a moment, when you could get the ink from many different manufactures.

But what changed, was that HP started to make their printers accept only very specific kind ink, which was controlled by the printers and HP, not by the ink manufacturers (compare to HDDs).

They added one sort of digital signatures for the ink, so that printer reads signatures and does not otherwise accept it. So it does not matter whether these was cartel or not; it was just DRM lock-in. As long as the core product was desirable enough. I don't think this is a cartel in a traditional sense, because manufacturing of the ink cartridges wasn't that difficult otherwise, and it wasn't forbidden or highly regulated area.

In Synology's case, this was just that they added similar checks for NAS. It does not matter if other manufacturers don't comply with, if core product is good enough. Synology thought that their product was good enough to play this, but apparently not.

[consp]

How? You need to restrict the HDD sales and put them into the cartel.

[nicce]

Have you read the whole post...?