You could replace a few words and that comment would apply to last year's "one more thing": video chat. And many people did make exactly those comments. (Actually most of them said "Apple did it first! Wait, Europe had what a decade ago? Okay, I meant Apple did it best! That's why it'll catch on this time.")
As far as I can tell it's still the same niche users using it for the same niche tasks (talking to kids on business trips, sexting etc.). Nice to have for those that need it, but they mostly had it already via netbooks with Skype.
Likewise, I'm hearing about how this is going to transform computing for people with certain disabilities, when they've apparently just bought the same Dragon software you've been able to buy for years (for transcription, the Siri stuff is apparently semi-distinct).
Don't get me wrong, I like that I can already call up songs in my car by voice with my $100, no-contract, chinese-branded, 600Mhz ARM11 Android phone with a 3rd party, free, ad-supported app. (I amuse myself by practicing my french pronunciation with it too) The gushing just gets a bit old, as does the speculation about what magical powers the A5 must have to enable such wizardry.
I think the issue with FaceTime is actually more to do with people finding they don't like looking at themselves, and their appearance on camera. I am of course obligated to here mention David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
In the book, people begin to go so far as to buy masks and hologram replications of themselves to look as ideal as possible. This quote sums up the key problem:
"The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, and (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech."
As to accessibility you should also keep in mind that Apple has a great track record with that community through their work on the Mac and the iPhone, this is likely to greatly improve it.
I don't think Facetime's first year was a good measure of it's longer term outlook. The inability to use it with any past iOS products severely limited the launch impact - you were limited to whoever was buying the iPhone 4. With the 4S, just about everyone on an iOS device will have Facetime, and iMessage is obviously an effort to further this sense of a BBM-style device "club" among one's peers.
A lot of people have Macs. Plus Steve said that FaceTime was going to be an open standard, but that never happened. If they thought the network effect was a problem, they sure haven't tried solving it.
What exactly makes them incomparable? I think it is fairly apt. They were both the "one more thing", both were Apple versions of existing technologies that some people are claiming will succeed mostly cause they are Apple versions, they are really power user features that lack mass adoption currently, both face social mores that make their use somewhat awkward and so on. I think all signs point to Facetime the sequel. A damn good product that is used once or twice to test, a lot by a couple of people, and is mostly inconsequential.
For one thing, FaceTime is a multi-party tool which falls victim to the network effect. The first people to get an iPhone 4 had few people they could FaceTime with, so it wasn't very useful to them.
Siri, on the other hand, doesn't depend on anyone else having anything in particular. Siri would be just as useful if you were the only person on the planet able to use it. I think that will make a huge difference in adoption.
What?! No, certainly not. When FaceTime gets adaption you will not know whether Siri will also be able to get adaption. The reverse is also true. They are completely different features.
What "marketing hype"? Being announced last on a keynote?
People attribute special powers to Apple's "marketing hype" but 99% is web generated --articles, posts, comments, user anticipation etc, not from some Apple's marketing campaign.
Except if showing the Facetime and Siri features in its tv ads qualifies as "marketing hype".
In any case, Facetime is an iOS/Mac feature. Noone expected it to catch as much as Skype, if only because there are like 80% more Skype-capable devices out there (like, say, all Windows boxes).
And Apple even made some bad decisions IMHO in promoting it: no OSX client from the beginning, not integrated with other apps (say, iChat), not promoted for PCs bundled with iTunes, etc.
When you're hiring Oscar winning directors to make the (series of) adverts based entirely around one feature you're well into "marketing hype" territory.
A few people made the sensible point that Facetime was going to have a hard time displacing Skype due to network effects (and Wifi limitations), or indeed being useful at all for many people without large numbers of iPhone 4 using family and friends who they didn't see face-to-face enough. Many others seemed to have forgot that Skype and other such video chat tech such as iChat even existed in their excitement for this revolutionary technology.
A position I feel they were forced into since this was the big finale "one more thing" in an iPhone announcement, and therefore couldn't be considered a bit of a damp squib if they wanted to maintain face.
As far as I can tell it's still the same niche users using it for the same niche tasks (talking to kids on business trips, sexting etc.). Nice to have for those that need it, but they mostly had it already via netbooks with Skype.
Likewise, I'm hearing about how this is going to transform computing for people with certain disabilities, when they've apparently just bought the same Dragon software you've been able to buy for years (for transcription, the Siri stuff is apparently semi-distinct).
Don't get me wrong, I like that I can already call up songs in my car by voice with my $100, no-contract, chinese-branded, 600Mhz ARM11 Android phone with a 3rd party, free, ad-supported app. (I amuse myself by practicing my french pronunciation with it too) The gushing just gets a bit old, as does the speculation about what magical powers the A5 must have to enable such wizardry.