It's incredibly amazing that the company has been able to manage a "stealth mode " approach for as long as it has.
Here's a study on keeping secrets which includes formulas for maintaining them. The tables are interesting in that all measures of time are made in days, not weeks or months. Math geeks might enjoy the formulations, but focus on the tables will give you the outcomes. Bottom line, for any single secret, when you include more than 4 people, no single secret can be expected to remain secure for more than a week.
http://stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Publications/PDF/Mfms.pdf Stealth mode is the maintenance of not one, but a virtual library of secrets---technological, tactical, strategic, no doubt commercial and military as well. The burden of managing and maintaining secrecy is daunting and ultimately futile. Those with punitive sanctions are most easily managed. But the closer the company comes to opening up, the more impossible the task becomes.
It is apparent that stealth mode is no longer a viable strategy. Information that has been managed is no longer manageable. Disinformation and misdirection are short term tactics to delay exposure (milestone delay/sputter tool for example) but the company is at a point where credibility can become compromised if these tactics are used for those aspects of progress that involve multiple, especially external, parties.
Maintenance of the technological and scientific secrets can be continued to some extent due to the limited number of scientists who actually understand the technology, but the company has historically provided some level of detail regarding the potential, progress and capabilities via presentations, public documents and ads. You simply cannot hold the bag high in the air and proclaim "the cat is in the bag" , and then try to deny that the bag, if not the cat, clearly exists.
I suspect they are fully aware that further prolonged delays in some level of disclosure will damage their credibility, and that they must at the very least let the cat poke out its head for all to see.
