How will you sell Vista to your clients?

I currently don't have access yet to Vista and am wondering what, if anything, will Vista offer our clients in terms of business needs etc..?

What does it provide (besides a Fripp startup sound byte) that customers don't already have, or have access too?

What is MS innovating here besides just another MS OS that is going to provide real business value, and ROI?

What immediate benefits will customers see to out weigh the cost's of upgrade and deployment (I assume hardware need's and provisioning)?

IOW what is the point? Besides a new fancy vector graphics engine, (soon to be released) what real improvements are to be seen in Vista.

From what I have seen and read, I can't for the life of me think of a way to convince clients that this is a worthwhile investment. I am talking average clients, not multi national corporations that need a reason to spend stockholders money.

How will you convince your clients to change, or will you?

I'm not a salesman just a dev, so maybe I am missing the whole Vista "golden sales pitch". I would be interested in hearing input  on the above.

In all honesty, you'll probably want clients to wait a while before upgrading.  I'm curious as to how Longhorn server will be better than Win2k3 server.  Active Directory is great for managing IT, from what parts of it I know.

They're still using Windows 2000 where I work, so probably in about ten years after they're done with XP. Seriously I don't see companies switching over for a good year after Vista comes out, and only then if software becomes incompatable with XP. This is what happened with 98e when people went to buy new software and you had to have XP to run it. Businesses will be the last to switch over before personal users.

Vista will offer a lot in terms of stability, security, and manageability. Increased uptimes - not really important for a client OS - better security, which leads to less time fixing it, though that's a soft cost, and easy to manage and deploy. Integrated search should also make a difference in productivity.

That's about it. Everything else is just gravy.

So it'll be at least a couple years. Microsoft might release another client version of their OS before companies move on from XP/2k.

On the consumer side, it's a bit different. It's facinating to watch the coverage of CES, and see Microsoft's strategy slowly coming together in the devices revealed. Consumers might not upgrade their main machines, but elements of Vista should appear everywhere else.