Agreed, it's a very treacherous path but given the history I think erring on the side of silence is exactly the thing not to do. I probably remember to check in here about once every couple of weeks. Every time that I do and there isn't any news or updates on 998, my gut tells me something is wrong. Call it conditioning.
I must be conditioned differently. I don't see a reason to assume that silence must equate to problems. OPPO Digital was very quiet (some would say painfully so) on development of their first Blu-ray player. For a long time (right up until the format war ended), they were very non-committal on their plans. Throughout the first eight months of 2008, they remained vague whenever anyone asked. Then a sample of the BDP-83 showed up in ABT's booth at CEDIA in 2008, they shipped 350 EAP samples six months later, and they started selling to the general public a couple months later. Was their silence a sign of trouble? Doesn't seem like it, since the BDP-83 has become the reference player for many people and could be considered one of the most popular standalone BD players produced to date.
I'm sure there are marketing gurus out there who would say otherwise but I think some sort of progress report, even if it isn't all great and wonderful news, is better than a total absence of information. It would give us all something to think about, including the skeptics who will otherwise feast on the silence.
Just my 2 cents.
I'd suggest we look at history. When Outlaw was developing the Model 950, they offered regular reports on progress. These typically included some sort of schedule. When delays occurred, people got angry. In time, they forgot, but it was a brutal launch for Outlaw. When Outlaw announced the Model 997 in October 2008, the Sherwood receiver it was to be based on was already more than 12 months late based on its original public release date (CES 2007 promised a fall 2007 launch). The Sherwood took another year or more to come to market, and it arrived in a form that clearly needed more work. Sherwood has been badly embarrassed and Outlaw was forced to pull the plug rather than give their customers a product they didn't feel comfortable with. When Emotiva started developing the UMC-1 (then called the LMC-2), they offered regular reports with promises of a close release date. They did that for years, and the product was postponed roughly 24 months before the first units shipped to customers. It arrived buggy and seemingly very rushed. People got angry. Compare those to the Model 990, which appeared out of nowhere. That was probably Outlaw's most successful product launch, and it came with no advance discussion.
That brings us back to the Model 998. We've been given a preliminary feature set and an indication that it could be ready as soon as late this year. That initial announcement was certainly related to the fact that they'd had to scrap the 997. Now that they've said something, though, what do they do next? If they come back and report something every two weeks or even every four weeks, what will they say? They can't post code or block diagrams or wiring diagrams. It'd be cool, but it's not practical to ask for. Anything they offer right now is likely to be hollow chest-thumping, and even if they were sailing along ahead of schedule they'd be crazy to try to offer any more specific details on availability unless they were very close to launch. There will always be skeptics and critics - it's part of life, doubly so on the internet. Regular reports wouldn't prevent them from suggesting there are problems, and reports that offer little new information will likely just make their job easier. After two or three reports that said roughly the same thing ("We're working on the hardware and firmware, the team is making good progress, and we've found and addressed a few problems"), those skeptics would have a field day over the project's perceived lack of progress.
I've got two projects on my desk right now. Both will be issued to contractors fairly soon - one in a couple weeks, the other in about a month and a half. The work I've done on them so far is important stuff, but if I showed it to a building owner he would have no idea what any of it meant and he would be underwhelmed by my work. He might even feel that the schedule was impossible to meet because the engineer hadn't "done anything" yet. That's why I don't give a building owner weekly or monthly status reports on my design - it would distract me from doing my job, and it wouldn't help the building owner. We meet and discuss specific details, and we issue a couple of progress packages, but even on a really large project that takes a year or more to design there may be only a handful of meetings and a few progress printings. Designing a product like a surround processor is very different in some ways, but in others I think there are some very real parallels.
