Re: Living in a bubble?
I used to work in a place somewhat like that. Outlook was the Corporate standard mail, but (somewhat surprisingly) IMAP was enabled on the Exchange servers, so those of us with Linux and FreeBSD could get by.
Then, IT eventually mandated O365 instead of the local Exchange servers, and enabled Microsoft's proprietary(?) MFA scheme along with it, and that was enough for a lot of Linux folks -- the company lost some good devs from that. Still, if you had the right MFA token gadget and didn't mind reading your mail via a browser, you could muddle along with O365.
Then, IT decided that only Windows systems would be allowed to connect to the Corporate LAN, with Cisco's proprietary(?) profile scanner software (I forget the name), which has no Linux version. Covid happened around this time, so if you were fortunate enough to be working from home *and* have an approved copy of Cisco's VPN client software from IT, you could connect to work that way.
Seemed like a lot of Windows-only hurdles for a company making products based on Linux.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
