"Why didn't we announce Shel's leaving? Because I don't believe in announcing people have left. Microsoft didn't announce it when I left, either. I made it very clear that there were some major changes to the show coming (I Twittered and FriendFeeded that several times on Thursday) and astute viewers could see for themselves what the changes were in live time and we even had an open live chat room after the show where people could have asked about the changes they saw (we made several changes to the latest WorkFastTV show)." - Robert Scoble

Perfectly fine if you didn't want to pre-announce Shel's leaving. But I wonder about citing Microsoft as precedent. If Microsoft had only two principals and one of them left, they might announce it. We certainly heard something about Bill Gates leaving. They also announced it when Paul Allen left the Board of Directors and when Nathan Myhrvold left the CTO slot. - Michael Markman

I've been musing about this in the general sense - I wrote http://mrontemp.blogspot.com/2008... but may write more in the future. I guess it boils down to whether the relationship with the company is more or less important than the relationship with the person. One could claim that when John Doe leaves WidgetCo, it doesn't matter in the long run because WidgetCo will assign Jane Dew to the customer relationship. On the other hand, WidgetCo could say, "We know you've been accustomed to working with John Doe, but he's gone. Let me introduce Jane Dew to you." Cases can be made on both sides. - Ontario Emperor