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'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 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."

Colonial I might be in agreement with you if we were not that Scott's March 26th announcement about the 998 has not even been three months.
I am not saying anything other than I think we should have some patience.
If indeed some one out there is in need of a processor there are many varieties to choose and from many good companies with top end products.
Also there are a varity of outlets, Home and Audio stores, E-Bay, Audiogon, Best Buys and the list goes on.
Like I wrote in an early post having the 990 is a good thing and I am please everytime I turn the sucker on. My neighbors are jealous, my friends are jealous, my family is jealous, hell my wife is jealous.
I am still looking forward to Outlaws' take on the 998. Regardless of when it happens. I for one are not in a rush.

I'm ready if you need someone to do beta testing :0

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'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.

the term watch this comes to mind, talking about the 998..

I give it another 6-24 month's..

To be fair, I didn't say that my gut is always right. :-) When I mentioned history I was being pretty specific. I'd latched onto the concept of the 997 and waited in vain with everybody else through the sort of information blackout there towards the end.

While I mostly agree with your points regarding status updates. I think progress can be communicated in ways that don't require schematics and bills of materials. Since a preliminary feature set was communicated, one milestone to report on could be the final feature set. Another milestone that I think average person can get hyped up about is when Beta-Testing commences. Why announce a product like this if you aren't prepared to manage the consumer's anticipations, expectations and perceptions? If there's that much risk in their schedule, it sure seems like it'd be a whole lot less painful for Outlaw if they just kept something like this secret until it was ready to manufacture minus two weeks.

Since they let the cat out of the bag, I'd get a "feel good" out of just seeing a placeholder for it on their website.

I agree with that - don't know when they might be at a good milestone to offer an update, but one or two intermediate reports during the course of development would be fun to see.

we all would like to see the update process more frequently though I doubt it will happen that way, my guess a status update every 3-6 month's if we're lucky just to keep people interested in the product if it ever gets of the preproduction sample table..

Every project has critical milestones, and project completion is always going to be monitored, at least in part, by the achievement of these milestones and their adherence to schedule. I think that without having to divulge many details (in fact, we don't even necessarily need to get into the minutiae of what these milestones are), Outlaw can easily give us a progress report via this forum, even if it adjusts the ultimate delivery date. Anyone ever involved in project management knows that dates slip, sometimes out of anyone's control (997 anybody?), but I also think that the readers on this forum are savvy enough to understand that, and would welcome any information that gives them a better idea as to how their expectations need to be adjusted. Let's face it, we're all kind of HT/Audio geeks out here, and we love this kind of stuff...

Hmmm I do want to wait but I have a chance to purchase an Onkyo Txnr5007 for 1100, but I prefer a pre/pro. Not in that big a hurry, but this offer has a end of month deadline. If I knew the 998 would be available this year I would wait, but with the lack of any more info I may be using the Onk as a pre/pro by next month.



ED