I went to several WWDCs that had these Q&A sessions, and pretty quickly I stopped going to them. The problem was that the questions were usually very poor, and even when the questioner was asking something that I wanted to know the answer to, I already knew the answer: Either the person on stage didn't know the answer, or couldn't give it, or it was an issue that hadn't yet been decided and so there was no answer.
Many of the "questions" were more expressions of someone's opinion, and almost always these opinions disagreed with the direction Apple was going (otherwise you'd have no reason to complain, naturally) and in every case I can think of, I remember there being evidence that Apple had already considered the perspective of the person complaining.
Apple goes its own way, and of course some people are not going to like it. Many people who don't like it before the fact, do like it after the fact-- remember the derision the iPad and iPhone got between when they were announced and when they shipped?
These Q&A sessions did, however, make it pretty clear to me that Apple is both aware of people's issues, considerate of them, and revealing as much as it can in the normal course of events at WWDC.
Further, I don't think they provided Apple with the feedback they were looking for, and Apple has instead shifted towards establishing relationships with people in the relevant industries and the developer community and keeps in touch with them directly.
I think Apple gets a lot of the good feedback at WWDC from the labs. It used to be, when WWDC was smaller, you could develop relationships with Apple employees at the beer bust and thursday party. But now, I think it is the labs, and the labs provide a time where both parities can dig into the details of the issue, hopefully with code, and figure out the right solution. Also, when labs are use to educate newbies to a technology, the questions they ask is a strong form of feedback.
So, I think Apple is getting the feedback from the community, even more now than it did then. It has just found better ways to do it.
Oh, I absolutely don't deny that Apple is getting more useful feedback in other ways. I just miss the totally random, occasionally useful, and controversial questions. It was just another thing now gone that made WWDC feel like more of a community of developers together rather than a bunch of separate individuals when someone would get up and rant about something a bunch of people were angry about (but of course Apple isn't going to do much about). Now it's all focused on the individual, and the extent of one's "OMG x is getting deprecated!"/"there's a big problem here!" rants is "I'm angry too" posts on devforums, filing radars blindly, and complaining on twitter.
Either way, I still get the "can't talk about it", "don't know", and "file a radar" responses, so I guess it doesn't matter so much what happens at WWDC for me.
Many of the "questions" were more expressions of someone's opinion, and almost always these opinions disagreed with the direction Apple was going (otherwise you'd have no reason to complain, naturally) and in every case I can think of, I remember there being evidence that Apple had already considered the perspective of the person complaining.
Apple goes its own way, and of course some people are not going to like it. Many people who don't like it before the fact, do like it after the fact-- remember the derision the iPad and iPhone got between when they were announced and when they shipped?
These Q&A sessions did, however, make it pretty clear to me that Apple is both aware of people's issues, considerate of them, and revealing as much as it can in the normal course of events at WWDC.
Further, I don't think they provided Apple with the feedback they were looking for, and Apple has instead shifted towards establishing relationships with people in the relevant industries and the developer community and keeps in touch with them directly.
I think Apple gets a lot of the good feedback at WWDC from the labs. It used to be, when WWDC was smaller, you could develop relationships with Apple employees at the beer bust and thursday party. But now, I think it is the labs, and the labs provide a time where both parities can dig into the details of the issue, hopefully with code, and figure out the right solution. Also, when labs are use to educate newbies to a technology, the questions they ask is a strong form of feedback.
So, I think Apple is getting the feedback from the community, even more now than it did then. It has just found better ways to do it.