The problem you see, home users, is that WD Discovery is free and the services to keep it developing and going is free of charge to the consumer and that is not sustainable. Solutions?
We live in a time when centibillionaires can ask users for $8 a month for a blue check mark and yet how can a service like WD Discovery and My Cloud Home be free forever? The history of Western Digital has been about an American manufacturing company that has had good innovation and produced good products but never could make very much money out of its efforts and now is itself forced to be sold off to Kioxia, a Japanese company.
Apple, Google and others could and would shamelessly ask users for up to $600 USD for 10 TB of cloud data storage per year and shamelessly scan user data for valuable information and yet they are trillion dollar companies. Similar storage service with Western Digitial? a $300 or so one time purchase of hardware. How do users expect WD to make money beyond the initial sales? The end result is lack of the company’s expenditure on research and innovation and cut back in quality of services and deprecation of existing services as time goes on.
The solution is simple, Western Digital needs to charge for certain services beyond the baseline functionality. A usage charge for example for users who use WD Discovery for desktop or mobile services beyond the average usage for a typical user - something in the range of a few dollars a month is certainly warranted and it still allows heavy users of cloud storage to save hundreds of dollars over large cloud service providers and also allows the privacy provided with user data which resides with the user-owned hardware and not at the mercy of trillion dollars cloud service companies.
Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting: https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask
Clearly home user are requesting a feature such as WD Discovery, otherwise why would there be so many threads about it? Home users also don’t know how to react to the loss, the deprecation of WD Discovery. Won’t it be great if there is a different reaction such as the example response from below from a similar VPN service called Tailscale:
Along with the usual excellent feature requests, every month we get feedback like this:
“Gonna pay for a Personal Pro plan, not because I need more devices or extra features… but simply because I want to pay them for some of the value they delivered.”
“Please continue doing what you are doing!”
“It’s perfect. Make me pay money for it!!”
“Keep it running please.”
This is the model that Western Digitial should use for services such as WD Discovery that should be similar to what Tailscale talked about with their service in contrast to policies of trillion dollar cloud companies that usurped the integrity of private user data:
Yeah “Uhh hey, can you not kill the functionality of the product we bought?” LOL like, do think that ticket is going to accomplish anything? Please explain in your mind what would happen, walk me down that path, please, I have to hear this mind-blowing logical train of thought.
