When it comes to marketing I think we can take a page from the Apple playbook. Never show anything incomplete. Critics and the general
public don’t understand the artistic process and will only become uneasy. nobody cares how you did it. Just show results.
At a more microscopic level, the same goes for git commits. Complete, sensible ideas are much easier to interact with and understand than someone's chaotic half thought through work-in-progress. There's value to this approach at all scales of magnification--completeness and polish aids digestibility and helps {colleagues, users, buyers, prospects} understand the value proposition.
As far as I know the first Apple computer was not really a computer but a box of parts that the customer had to assemble themselves. The early days of Apple is probably the best example of "building in public" because so much of it was actually just selling the dream. In any case, the opposite is infinitely worse. Too many people wasted away for years "building in private". If and when they did finally release it was to the sound of crickets. Hacking for pleasure is one thing. If you're trying to build a business then you must be always be selling and marketing.
That's true. But despite being the same legal entity, there is very little in common between 70s Apple and the Apple of today. We shouldn't really expect consistent behavior.
