Losing the person who is the head of their operations just diminishes credibility for their search and puts a larger question mark behind what they are doing. Overall, the move is not a good sign for their search prospects.
SEOs will be much more fragmented on different platforms within social networks. It'll help eliminate a lot of the search spammers, but is going to impact on anyone who gets rankings on search engines without having good content.
I think it's a good move for them. I've long wondered when they were going to get that whole thing put together. This is related to the idea of organizing information and helping people understand what's going on. Not to say that the other players out there aren't any good.
While the search marketing space grows, it's hard to get good people trained, If they're good, others want to poach them.
For anybody using Excite right now it should be a huge improvement because one of the problems with Excite was it's a relatively small database and that has meant that there have been good sites that just get dumped,