What makes things like this interesting is we don't quite know how the web world works in this regard yet. In the publishing world it didn't matter because what was important was the subscribers and the physical assets (printing press, building, etc...). In the software world people are everything. If the people walk out of an acquired startup the software dies.

But web publishing is different because it's not like software which requires exclusive use (most people won't use 2 different word processors for instance) and it's not like publishing where you have to pay for the product.

I'm reminded of people like Marshall Kirkpatrick and Duncan Riley who both broke off from Techcrunch and created successful sites without hurting the site they broke off from. At the same time there was a mass talent exodus from TVGuide.com a while back (they created their own site at TVGuidemagazine.com) and those people failed completely (eventually re-merging with tvguide.com)

So every time something like this happens it goes further towards answering the question of what is more important, the URL or the people