Ты is your friends, your family, and anyone your age or younger who you meet informally. Вы is most people you meet for the first time, anybody in a transaction, and people who are substantially older than you. Of course people are rarely that categorizable, so I often find myself trying to talk around the word "you" (which is pretty acrobatic and usually impossible given my Russian), or I just go with вы because it seems better to be uptight than disrespectful.
The idea of two words for "you" at first just seemed like it created unnecessary hierarchies and minefields of opportunities for awkwardness. Creepo Ed's friend Sam made me start to see it differently (he also argued pretty artfully that feminism destroyed the Western world, which was really engaging once but would probably get tiresome fast). He talked me through how our meeting would have gone if it had happened in Russian. When he met me at the door, we both would have been вы. Sitting around the kitchen, he would have switched to ты for me, but I would have stuck with вы since he's a good 15 years older. Then, when we were in his living room, a couple bottles of wine deep, listening to Depeche Mode and making bad 9/11 conspiracy jokes over our game of Jenga (I was totally winning until Ed knocked it over with his knee), then he would have been ты also.
The more the language starts to permeate me, the more I can feel the distinction between the two words and how it reinforces the way you should relate to someone. Being called вы makes me poised, being called ты makes me smile, and either makes me more sure of myself because I have a better sense of who I'm talking to.
In some of the younger, more Western-type companies, everyone is ты around the office, I guess to create the atmosphere of hey, we're all buddies here. I wonder how much that lightens things up and makes people comfortable, and how much it sacrifices peoples' respesct for each other and hides the power dynamic that's there whether it's spoken or not.
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