announcement timing

I learned something this week that I hadn't been able to articulate before. One excellent way to make an announcement is to do so when you know people are listening. That's why many Mac developers make their Mac-related announcements at the big events like MWSF and WWDC: the whole geek world looks to these events and expects to hear something. Of course, we don't only make announcements at these events, and we make sure that our announcements are appropriate for the event in question.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 09, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  August 09, 2006
  I understand why it's hard to keep the faith.  
  
  At MWSF, we knew that our users would be unhappy about the announcement from the Windows Media team.  And we know that most people don't make a distinction between their team and our team.  To the rest of the world, it's all Microsoft.  
  
  And we knew that our customers wouldn't be happy about some of our announcements here at WWDC.  But we did announce that we're working on RDC v2, so at least I can talk about that now!
  
  As I group, I think that we're being a bit too reticient in talking about Magnesium right now.  I understand the reasoning behind the reticience.  We had to rejigger all of our plans when we found out about the Intel transition.  And, of course, if something changes on the WinOffice schedule, we have to determine how that impacts us.  So there's a concern that if we say something now, one of our two major dependencies (or, if we're really lucky, both) could do something that would impact either our schedule or our ability to deliver on a promsied feature.  How frustrating is it to say 'we're doing X and it's really cool!' only to have to say a few months later 'we ran out of time' or 'it was harder than we thought'?