The real drawback isn't the team leaving, its groupthink. I think we've all experienced this firsthand at some point in our lives, especially when we're getting hired for the first time - you walk into a room with the entire programming team. You are a stranger, but the team know each other. The team has agreed upon a common methodology, a common programming language, a common framework, maybe they all use vim on the Mac. You walk in & say something stupid like, Hey guys, lets just do this in xyz language, you open your windows laptop & fire up TextPad & next thing you know, you're getting those weird "hey he's not really a part of our team" look. Then you pretend like you hit the wrong button and quickly bring up cygwin & they heave a sigh of relief :)
Lots of MS employees have iPhones, or use Google in the course of work. Responses vary. Fellow enthusiasts may give you the high-five. Your peers, and even younger managers might give you a light-hearted ribbing. Old-timers might give you a ribbing that's jokey on the surface, but actually a bit disapproving. Higher-up executives may actually indicate to you that it's a career-limiting move.
When I worked at Sun Microsystems, my manager & most of my colleagues used Windows. The inside joke was that Java performs much better on Windows than Solaris, but we weren't supposed to say that to our customers.
the founders of grouptalent would be prescient to advance sociometer usage - i'm going to blog about this in the next few days, but basically, you can determine electronically when groupthink conditions arise, typically within 30 seconds.
