[zottel]

Just a guess: They probably won't. And that's for an easy reason: If they tell people what they intend to do, and even more, WHEN they intend to do this, they will be nailed down to what they have said, regardless of whether they also said that they didn't know if they could fulfill their schedule.

Working on software is often a business of bad surprises. It looked so easy in the beginning, then you think about what it will take accomplish what you want, and it suddenly becomes much more complicated, and even when you think you have thought of all the consequences and errors your new feature might have, your first version will often show that there were so many problems that just didn't come to mind at the time you thought about it.

Which means: You start working on something and project a time for it that is about 1,5 or 2 times the time you actually think you will need. And in many cases, this time will still not suffice for actually accomplishing what you had in mind. And sometimes, it doesn't work at all or becomes so vastly complicated that it is abandoned altogther.

Now what if you have told people that this feature that you now have to abandon for complexity will be present in the next version? Not a nice prospect at all.

That's why software companies normally don't talk about new features that aren't near complete already.