Big, hard changes. Are you serious? lol.
Whether they would be considered significant advantages from a business point of view over what we already have is open to debate. There's a reason the majority of I.T. professionals and the I.T. media are dissatisfied with Vista and why it's being so frequently slammed even so long after its release. Vista is more like XP 1.5... unoriginal, uninspiring, unimpressive.
People seem to make the mistake of thinking that Vista gets slagged off just for the sake of it rather than for many legitimate reasons, primary of which are that despite its years in develpment its brought almost nothing significant to the table. It's regarded among many industry-wide as a dead duck, and if I thought it was genuinely worth upgrading to over XP I would be using it as we speak.
The only people that say that are those that, frankly, don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Vista was probably the biggest revamp to the Windows OS, well, ever.
Just off the top of my head:
1. New 64-bit hi fidelity sound stack, supports 3D microphones (useful for pervasive speech recognition - wait for Windows 7 to see what this technology can really do) Previous sound stack by comparison was 16-bit and had no native support for professional sound hardware that needs direct access.
2. New neworking stack that supports IPv6 natively and allows low-level network software (firewalls/IDS/sniffing) etc to hook in without resorting to hacks.
3. Completely new graphics sub system. GDI is gone, hurrah! WPF and the Desktop Compositor is in. Artifact-free desktop is finally here. As a side affect it is also much prettier because the Desktop Compositor can render pixel shaders just like any modern computer game!
4. Major security revamp inside the kernel. New "integrity levels" allow sandbox seperation of processes. UAC on the user-level provides sandboxing of processes and on-demand privilege elevation. So finally Windows can feasibly be run on a non-Administrator account now. Pre-NT 6.0 this was kind of possible but not really usable on a day-to-day basis, if at all - due to some applications simply not working on non-Administrator accounts.
5. Explorer is finally properly multi-threaded, so it takes advantage of multi-core CPUs.
6. RDP 6.0 allows individual programs to be remoted. As opposed to, traditionally, the whole desktop of a Terminal Server.
It's always hard for businesses to "value" an operating system. Their argument has and always will be "our current OS does everything we need". Nothing will change that. Just because businesses aren't upgrading (yet) to Vista doesn't mean it is "regarded industry-wide as a dead duck".
I seem to be saying this a lot recently but please understand that Vista is a "technology release". Technology releases always take longer than "user releases". Windows 7 will largely be a user release. That is because Windows 7 is going to just build upon the technologies that were established in Vista. If you think the "oh ever so pretty desktop" in Vista is bad then I can't imagine what critics will make of Windows 7. It's just going to be a complete and utter eye candy fest with not much interesting new stuff under the hood at all. Not that that bothers me as I quite like the eye candy and I am intelligent enough to realise that graphics cards will be *more than* powerful enough in 2009 to run it.
