Microsoft didn't try "Very Hard". They made some easy sacrifices on their ad-starved, money-losing search platform, then piled some money into advertising it, ran with it for a year or two, then gave up. This is historically one of Microsoft's biggest[1] weaknesses, they have no conviction. Their effort didn't touch anything outside Bing (or was it Live then?) and it certainly didn't extend to their APIs or anything challenging like this.
Apple's been pushing this for more than 5 years now, slowly working it pushing it through their stack and quietly[2] messaging about it for that entire time. They made it a company-wide priority, to the point where advertising companies and developers on their platform are complaining about it. They've been updating their APIs to block out this kind of crap for more than 5 years while gaining only small amounts of good-will around this.
So yeah... people take Apple's efforts here more seriously than Microsoft's half-effort.
[1] Pre-Satya Nadella. Seems like Nadella is quite a bit more focused than Ballmer, but still a bit hard to tell.
[2] Ok, maybe not too quietly, but they didn't make a big embarrassing advertising campaign either.
Apple's been pushing this for more than 5 years now, slowly working it pushing it through their stack and quietly[2] messaging about it for that entire time. They made it a company-wide priority, to the point where advertising companies and developers on their platform are complaining about it. They've been updating their APIs to block out this kind of crap for more than 5 years while gaining only small amounts of good-will around this.
So yeah... people take Apple's efforts here more seriously than Microsoft's half-effort.
[1] Pre-Satya Nadella. Seems like Nadella is quite a bit more focused than Ballmer, but still a bit hard to tell.
[2] Ok, maybe not too quietly, but they didn't make a big embarrassing advertising campaign either.