Indeed. Try as it might to paint a happy face on Giancarlo’s departure (the title of the press release announcing the resignation: ‘Cisco Evolves Senior Technology Leadership Team’), it is a major blow for Cisco–especially after Mike Volpi, another CEO candidate, left for online video company Joost last February.

“Charlie is too good for Cisco to lose,” Prudential analyst Inder Singh told the FT. “He has touched on or operated many different parts of their business. This will be fairly difficult for Cisco to explain and it will be difficult to replace him. They have a lot of people that probably will be groomed for the CEO position, but it’s not clear to me if there is anyone ready now. They’re all future prospects. You want to replace John Chambers with a John Chambers. It’s not clear that there’s anyone quite ready to take on that mantle.”

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.”

–Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu

Hulu.com, the News Corp./NBC Universal video service that sounds like it was named by the Web 2.0 Bull—t Generator™, went into private beta today, and while critics continued to snicker at the name, most admitted the ad-supported service was, by and large, pretty decent. ”I am impressed thus far,” wrote BoomTown’s Kara Swisher. “I will, of course, reserve judgment until I get to test-drive it for a while, but in concept and tone and aims–that is, more open than I ever expected the service to be–it is off to a good start.”

Over at GigaOm, Om Malik, who ridiculed the service this past summer, reversed course and called it brilliant. “From the moment I learned about the new company, I was skeptical,” he wrote. “And now, after spending three hours or so on the service, I am ready to eat crow. And not just any crow, but rotten, six-month-old crow: I have never been more wrong. … Hulu doesn’t seem like a YouTube (GOOG) competitor. (This is yet another thing I was wrong about.) What it really is trying to do is time shift–and place shift–television on a massive scale. It’s basically an attempt to counterbalance the tight control that cable and satellite networks have over distribution. [Hulu] is the kind of service that should scare start-ups trying to develop their own distribution platforms, such as Joost. It is also the kind of service, if it can attract enough viewers, that could succeed in relegating YouTube and others like YouTube to the ‘user-generated content’ world, at least in the U.S. market.”