[palata]

> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.

Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.

There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?

There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).

What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.

[kakacik]

A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).

Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come.

This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.

[palata]

Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives.

Why would it be different with email?

[mghackerlady]

Nobody got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Microsoft. People trust Mozilla though, they've built their brand on not sucking as bad as M$ and Google

[kakacik]

I don't think you understand what I was writing about - none of that is MS Office. Thats another topic, but without this (and say some sort of domain propagation rules) bigger corporations will never move out of MS.

[palata]

My understanding is that you say "someone could make an alternative to X and that would kill Microsoft because everybody hates Microsoft".

My answer is "there have been examples of alternatives to Microsoft products for decades, and it hasn't killed Microsoft at all, so I don't see why it would be different for another service (in your case, email)".

Did I misunderstand your point?

[MarsIronPI]

> A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).

Ooh, imagine if they also threw in some kind of Teams alternative, maybe based on XMPP or Matrix! That might get a lot of attention.

[CuriousRose]

It is certainly not low hanging fruit in the development effort space, but they can utilise open source projects in ways that MS cannot due to licensing, and therefore have much more resources overall in terms of community dev contributions.