Thing is that stakeholders of Steem have actually a right to know what Steemit Inc's plans are since that's what they're actually investing in. I'd rather compare it to a classic relationship between a stock corporation and their shareholders than a corporation like Samsung and their B2C end consumers who have actually no influence on the business at all.
I really think transparency is the key driver to trust here, and trust is fundamental for investments.
They might give less details on their plans, but I really don't believe that they should try to sell a black box to their partners.
On that note, Samsung doesn't telegraph concrete plans to their shareholders either, till they are confident about it. Samsung shareholders will know Galaxy S10 is in the works for 2019, but they won't know the exact price, release date and feature set, because Samsung Electronics themselves don't have that information yet. Anyway, all of this is irrelevant :)
There should absolutely be transparency, but only about things they themselves have knowledge of. There's transparency in their GitHub - it's easy to follow the development of Hivemind (the backend that drives Community) on GitHub. It's fair to announce that they are working on such a feature, and publish the specification (which again they have done to GitHub). However, saying something like "Communities will be ready Q3 2017" is naïve and self-defeating, and causes wholesale disappointment and lack of trust across the board. Instead, give out concrete details, including release dates, when you actually have the necessary knowledge to be confident about such a statement. Traders and shareholders alike will have far higher confidence in an organisation that delivers their stated goals on time and with the announced feature set.
I fully agree on what you said here. Also actually nobody needs so concrete release dates. Knowing that they're giving priority to certain features or projects already provides a lot of confidence. In the end it's the direction we agree or disagree on and the overall vision that might motivate us to invest or not.
Thanks for the valuable talk :-)
There is transparency if you look for it. Check out github to have an idea what they are doing. You can see what part of the SMT's is already developed and what they are working on.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/projects
If you are a developer then this might be of help. If not (and that applies for the majority of these 370,000+ active users), then it won't.