I mean the best big tech “products” are FOSS as well. But I guess it depends on which definition of FOSS that you use.

Usually, nowadays, proprietary software is built on 95% FOSS and then you maybe have a thin layer with your own stuff (which will become FOSS in a year or two when there’s someting better that can replace your own hack). The rest is content and marketing.

Proprietary software which doesn’t have an objectively better FOSS counterpart (that I can come up with right now):

1. Nvidia GPU stack. But ROCm and IPEX-LLM will probably catch up in a year or two (both are mainly FOSS).
2. Some videogames that still use their proprietary engines. Though they are certainly not good because of their in-house engine, rather the opposite. I.e. they are good because of content, not software.

Many people bring up proprietary CAD and graphics software. Though I suspect that’s a more subjective opinion. My experience is that proprietary CAD apps and the Adobe suite are buggy as hell. My experience is that the people who use these softwares have learned how to cope with the legacy crap and they refuse to learn new and better ways.

I had to integrate Photoshop into a project a few years ago. The whole software just smelled huge legacy bad quality code base. Buggy as hell. But good marketing and/or user lockin I guess.

I don’t consider anything from Apple to be good in an objective way. Unless you count social status symbols as an objective quality. I do consider price to be an objective quality though.

The only good things that has come out of Microsoft are open source. VS Code, dotnet core and Lean. Same goes for Google.