Because both the system's privacy and the security of digital money depend on encryption, a breakthrough in mathematics or computer science that defeats the cryptographic system could be a disaster. The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be the development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers^# (Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, 1995)

Actually, there is no need for breakthroughs; Bill Gates/Microsoft can “defeat the cryptographic system” by themselves with the simple formula:

Windows + Distributed computing = No cryptographic system^##

Almost 90% of the world’s computers have a Windows version installed (which is more than ONE BILLION computers). All of these individual machines can be guided to a common goal by distributed computing implemented in Windows (which isn’t a hard thing to do).

And this can actually be done without you knowing. Because Windows is not a common application, it is an Operating System (a closed source operating system). And what it does inside it’s out of your reach.

Moreover this extends to updates also; 99.99% of Windows users have no idea what every update is supposed to do; and those who have, have no certainty that the update is exactly what Microsoft says it is.

So, Microsoft has the possibility to harness the power of almost all the computers in the world. 

Does it do it? And if it does, what for?

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^# To factor prime numbers is trivial (no matter how small or large they are). Gates probably meant to factor the product of large prime numbers (which is used in asymmetric cryptographic algorithms).

^## I expressed the same idea more than five years ago on my previous blog in a post called “The” Code Breaker. I considered to be the time to reiterate the idea after reading this article: Debate Over Internet Backdoors Heats Up in Congress and in Court.

Google to Microsoft: Cheaters!
Microsoft to Google: Is this the way smart guys are called today? 

The above is my personal interpretation of what started with this post in which Google say that they have proved that Bing copies their results, by making tests with some unusual words. Microsoft responded here and then the entire web went frenzy.

Let’s look from the Bing user perspective.  He wants to get better results so he agrees to let Microsoft get what it needs to improve its service. And Microsoft gets user’s data stream; if the user searches something on any search engine Microsoft records what the user has chosen and improves Bing. It records user preferences.  

But, for those preferences, Google (or any other search engine) helped with good search results. Maybe better than Microsoft's, otherwise the user would have used only Bing.

We all learn from our collective customers, and we all should, say the Bing Team. “We all should” means Google also, as it has also a browser and a toolbar and can do the same, but Google didn’t think of it. Maybe because this isn’t convenient for the number one on the market with the engine still considered the best; the competitors have more to learn from it than it has to learn from them. So, it wants Microsoft to stop.

I don’t think Microsoft will stop as there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal. (If it were, we would’ve probably already had a law suit). The PR war has started and the impression on user might be surprising – the copy thing might be a two edges sword – the user might interpret it this way: if we search with Google we have the Google engine, if we use Microsoft’ service we have Bing + Google engines together which sounds better so we’ll chose the latter. But, most of them couldn’t care less what Google or Microsoft does.

In my opinion Google saw themselves as the winners of the search war too early. Microsoft didn’t give up. They got more specialists, more innovative ideas and lately the results are starting to be seen; their search engine if not outperforms at least caches up Google’s.  And Google is off guard; and will try  everything to undermine Bing; this time by inducing the idea that if Bing improved so much is just because it copies Google’ search results.

Hopefully the war will never end; this way, we the users will have the most to benefit.