Investment News carried an story on Vanguard's announcement that they are changing equity index providers from MSCI to CRSP (domestic and balanced) and FTSE (international). The change in providers will reduce the licensing costs of using the indexes a bit, though I doubt that is the reason for the change (the recent reduction in fees by BlackRock and Schwab notwithstanding). CRSP has the most comprehensive stock price data, and thus a more robust universe from which to construct its domestic indexes. FTSE's indexes are expansive, though I am not sure how they compare to MSCI's. ( The article does mention that FTSE assigns the Korean market to the emerging markets index, while MSCI relegates it to the developed markets index.)
Having worked with Vanguard for over fifteen years, I am certain that this change was studied to death before being adopted. Some ten years ago, when Vanguard moved for the S&P and Russell indexes to MSCI's, issues of coverage and allocation were modeled for effect on risk and performance. I expect that any differences in expected performance will be compensated with the reduced fees and reflective of any change in the risk profile. Overall, I do not expect fund performance under the new indexes to diverge more than a few basis points per quarter from the performance of the old indexes, as adjusted for the an appropriate expense ratio.
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