A very interesting post. To me this illustrates a couple of points very well.

1) VMWare likely have no idea what they lost when they cut this team. Once teams just look like just a number of people to be re-located to save costs, there tends not to be consideration of the value of a long-lived team with the experience and team spirit that this post talks about.

2) If you're an employee of a large corp, never ever stay out at a role out of "company loyalty", it's a mugs game. Not to say that that's true for all companies, but large ones seem to have a distressing tendency to treat people as numbers to be valued and shifted and cut, and loyalty shown by the person to the company means very little in these circumstances.