It’s difficult to know if a business you frequent uses Microsoft, but I suppose you can always ask.
But, as an individual you can choose to avoid MS. Linux is really good these days and Libre Office will do most of what you need. It may not be identical to the MS experience, but you do have a choice.
It’s not identical and there is a learning curve. That applies both to Linux and to LibreOffice. But that’s a choice everyone has to make. Do you want convenience or do you want digital sovereignty? You can’t have both. On the positive side, once you get over the initial hump Linux provides an altogether better user experience just on account of not being enshittified.
It’s actually quite simple to determine who an organization uses for their mail and data. All you need to do is review a domains DNS records (using a tool like dnschecker.org) and look at the MX record.
DNS records are public information. The two biggest players in the space are Microsoft and google, the majority of SMBs do not host their own mail servers.
It’s difficult to know if a business you frequent uses Microsoft, but I suppose you can always ask.
But, as an individual you can choose to avoid MS. Linux is really good these days and Libre Office will do most of what you need. It may not be identical to the MS experience, but you do have a choice.
It’s not identical and there is a learning curve. That applies both to Linux and to LibreOffice. But that’s a choice everyone has to make. Do you want convenience or do you want digital sovereignty? You can’t have both. On the positive side, once you get over the initial hump Linux provides an altogether better user experience just on account of not being enshittified.
It’s actually quite simple to determine who an organization uses for their mail and data. All you need to do is review a domains DNS records (using a tool like dnschecker.org) and look at the MX record.
For Microsoft/office365, you’ll see some variation of “protection.outlook.com”/“exchange.domain.com”. For google, you’ll see a variation of " MX.google.com".
DNS records are public information. The two biggest players in the space are Microsoft and google, the majority of SMBs do not host their own mail servers.