Yeah, I'm sure they would be able to deploy the service, have it secure and updated, having apps up to date on their new devices. Or maybe that takes time and effort, and people need to pay their bills.

I think for people don’t mind paying for things they actualy own.

For instance grand-parents don’t want to pay for instagram but will pay premium to have great pictures printed and framed.

Or pay to have their own ___domain name.

People pay for Dropbox or Squarespace.

I’d totally see my parents paying for a Synology if someone could install it and maintain it for around 10$/€ a month. Currently they pay for one time install fees + maintenance hours for their windows machine for instance, it’s not a big stretch.

Synology is heavily business focused, but I do feel they're making steps towards competing with the bigger companies by offering smaller scale options. They now have Chat, Drive, and Moments which all do things like Slack, GDrive, and Timehop and with apps. Obviously the main caveat is they're not as refined/full featured.

The profit margins need to be high enough to justify investing in the product before you know whether anyone will ever want to buy it.

The margins of successful products also need to fund all the failed attempts at making stuff that ultimately no one wants.

I think innovation without speculation is impossible and speculation has a cost.