Having seen the employment agreements for both, I can confidently say that Google's clause is the same as Microsoft's. Microsoft may be less strict about enforcing it, but the language was the same.

It's entirely possible that at Microsoft nobody cares and it's an unwritten rule that you can do what you want, while Google has explicit policies which have the effect of chilling things further when they don't work.

Let people do nothing and they will do whatever they want. Let people do a little bit and they'll be scared out of doing any more, for fear of having that little bit taken away, or being made to look ungrateful for what they were allowed. Which is exactly what happened/is happening to me, when cdibona banned me from the corp processes, and now when tytso etc are saying I should've been thankful.