Hard fork happened in the Ethereum before. It changed from Frontier to Homestead a few months ago.
are you reading this thread? that hard fork was planned and expected and designed to improve the system, something everyone agreed on and was flagged well in advance.
this hard fork is a knee jerk reaction to a poorly designed third party app and solely designed to save asses that don't really deserve to be saved.
Most miners think there should be a hard fork.