m$ has got so much better since he left.
Do they all get a derogatory psuedonym?
adob$ amaz$ face$ goog$ mailchim$ etc etc etc
or is the negativity reserved for M$
Suggesting there is something wrong with a software company because it makes money seems to be a blow in from 1990's militant open source philosophy and probably best left in the 1990s.
At the time, the M$ acronym was IMO well earned. These days it appears to be different. Microsoft still has a large dominance on the desktop, but appears to not be playing quite as hard ball anymore. Stuff like NodeJS on Azure and VSCode would simply not have happened in the early 2000. Whether they actually changed, time will tell.
As for other companies deserving a derogatory acronym, I think you can measure these companies with:
1) How much do they actually subvert/interfere with standards and other companies inventions to gain/maintain their market dominance?
2) Do they at all innovate to deserve their market position and/or give back?
Without much analysis, I think Adobe may actually deserve an Adob$. Here you have a company that still almost every year change their proprietary binary formats (.PSD, .AI, etc) forcing an entire creative industry to spend a lot on software that have largely not had any significant innovation for the last 10-15 years (the functions in Photoshop/Illustrator have more or less remained the same).
And it is the same lock-in as Microsoft Office has/had, because even if you decide to operate your creative business using only alternative software, your clients and suppliers won't.
It doesn't help that not one of your examples is replacing an 's' with a '$'.
Adob€ and Goog£€ have some potential though.
If you hated MS in the '90s/'00s for what they did back then, you should have that same hatred right now, but not especially for MS but also for Apple and (to a lesser extent) Google.
But the battle, and the war, was lost long before Apple became the behemonth it is now. Apple did nothing to kill OS, it arrived when it was dead.
As for Google, they actually played a positive role back then. Whatever they do now, does not matter anymore. The window of oportunity closed long ago, and it was M$ who did it.
Stop living in the past. Do you just want to wallow in self-pity about what could have been or are you actually upset about real problems that are fixable?
Apple is halting progress of web standards right now. Apple is locking in users into its closed ecosystem (good luck trying to develop for iOS without macOS). Google and Facebook are "embracing, extending, extinguishing" the web (AMP, Instant Articles, PNaCl, etc). Even the W3C has bowed down to the copyright industry with proprietary window dressing in the name of DRM.
Not everything these companies do is evil, the attacks are far less orchestrated than those carried out by Microsoft back in the days, but they're happening and they're here.
If you just want to hate Microsoft for nostalgia's sake like the grumpy old vet who still can't get over how the US lost in Vietnam, that's fine. But don't pretend you care about principles if all you can do is hold a grudge against what was and don't give a fuck about what is.
I am relatively cool about Google.
I do not live in the past, but I still like to point out what happened, whenever I get the chance. They are solely to blame (with a minor role by Sun / SCO) of the mess we are in. As I already mentioned, Apple is simply evil, but is not to blame for the destruction of OS.
For me to change my mind about M$, BIG things should happen. I think the minor grievance of referring to them by M$ can be endured, even by sensitive bystanders.
Those who know what we are talking about, understand that. If they nevertheless attack it as childish, even knowing that what lies behind is a complex story of ideology wars, propelled by lies and disinformation, are simply being dishonest.
Those who don't know what lies behind the symbolism, maybe care to inform themselves.
Its an off the cuff shorthand term.
The defensiveness of some people here is incredible.
I was pissed at the time, I've loathed them plenty. But corporations are not people, they are generally without morals, I never expected them to be or do good.
Now the leadership is different, the company mostly acts differently. I can still be vary of them but I'll applaud their good calls.
In that situation, Apple would not have succeeded as a walled garden, as it has.
So, although OS-the-product is still going strong, OS-the-movement was effectively stopped on its tracks. Which is a very bad thing, in my opinion.
I don't believe that the FUD from MS actually accomplished anything besides a very minor short term benefit where people didn't touch the GPL for legal reasons. Businesses are smart and they are very capable of figuring out what does and doesn't make money. Heck even Google figured out that being open is bad for business.
OS-the-movement OTOH is going strong. Its cool to have contributed to an open source project. Its cool to have all your work up on github. Its pretty much a gold star on your resume if you have a popular OSS project...