If a company says "we plan to..." then odds are they are telling the truth. At the time of writing that is exactly what they were planning to do. It turns out that sometimes plans change. Or planned things take longer than initially planned for.
But of course if you ever say anything on the internet people treat it like a promise and then you get called a liar. This is why we can't have nice things.
Reputable people and organizations who make such statements will then proceed to deliver. If they suspect they won't be able to, for whatever reason, then they'll be careful not to make such statements in the first place.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with holding people and organizations to a very high standard regarding what they've publicly claimed that they will or aim to do.
https://github.com/holman/feedback/issues/534#issuecomment-4...
More like this is why we can't have nice promises. Promises, on their own, are useless. Why should you get the PR boost from an openness promise if you don't actually end up fulfilling it? This is pretty much like false advertising, where you promise some aspects of a product and end up delivering something different. No matter your excuse, this is wrong and unfair to competitors.
But business is business and companies still end up making those weak promises to grab some more market share.
Anyone who has ever worked on anything in their life knows that plans change. Sometimes plans change to something else that's better. Sometimes ideas that are great on paper don't work in practice and need to be scrapped. Sometimes a plan is a great idea but an unanticipated roadblock makes it impossible or prohibitively expensive to accomplish.
So yes. Companies can never say anything publicly until it's already done. And I think that's a god damned shame. So again I say, this is why we can't have nice things.
Why?
That said, we all know "that guy". You know, the slick "idea guy" marketer who always has grand plans but never follows through? Who jumps on any hot PR topic that gets him publicity? After a while, you sort of tune him out, because you know his plans never amount to anything.
I have no idea whether cloudflares efforts fall into this pattern. But I know enough companies that behave this way that I think I can safely say that not all corporate "plans" are announced with the intentions of actually following through on them.