The only way to counter-act a surveillance society is for the population observed to practice constant inverse-surveillance on the observers (i.e. sousviellance).

Great, now we've gone from regular cell phones that might be used by a predator to harass their victim unawares, to a case where the cell phone itself is performing the harassment.

After reading some of the other replies, I suspect this will not be the most popular response, but here goes.

At my current employer, we have a de facto standard on Microsoft development tools. This is not an enforced standard, but rather a recommended standard because the MS dev tools are the right tools for the job.

Our problem domain is the processing of electronic documents for the e-discovery phase of litigation. This includes parsing e-docs to extract metadata and full-text and other relevant information to store in a database, so that each record can be reviewed as potential evidence for a trial.

The majority of documents we receive from our clients (law firms and major corporations) are Microsoft Office format; Outlook .PSTs, .DOCs, .XLS, etc. This is probably because MS Office is such a highly used program in the corporate world. In any case, due to the relatively closed nature of the Office document formats, the best way to extract the data we need are the Microsoft APIs and, consequently, Visual Studio/.NET/etc.

After developing core tools for the problem domain, there is significant investment in terms of man-hours (of .NET code) and money (i.e. software licensing costs) which can be reused or built-upon for future development.

No developer would be actively prevented from using different tools, frameworks, languages, etc. However, it is encouraged to use the standard tool-chain because it makes sense given all the prior work which can be capitalized on for future development. Additionally, a lot can be said for consistency in development environments when it comes to multiple developers working on the same system.