Windows 7 Enterprise Edition will have DVD playback (Vista EE doesn't)

You're saying "So what? Doesn't Vista have DVD playback?"

Yeah, it does - but not Enterprise Edition. When I learned this (back in about 2006) I was baffled.

I told Microsoft that enterprise customers really DO want DVD playback support in Enterprise edition of Windows. (It's not in Vista Enterprise, grr.

This is annoying because now we get to choose between paying an extra fee per user to get native DVD playback support, or having to install the stupid DVD software that comes from the OEM.

And the lovely OEM's have different versions of the packages, each of which will only consent to work on a few of their models - so we have to keep a whole library of DVD playback software and coordinate it with each model. And we can't include it in the core image, so it's a deploy-time addition, which means time waiting for the install to happen. What an annoying waste of time and effort! But not quite annoying enough to justify paying a few bucks per user times tens of thousands of users to those who pay the bills.

Happily, Microsoft listened! And Windows 7 Enterprise WILL include DVD playback. Thank goodness. And thanks for listening, Microsoft.

Windows 7 Enterprise Edition Customer Benefits - Windows for your Business - The Windows Blog: "Windows 7 Enterprise includes all end user features available in Windows 7 Professional, as well as the DVD Playback Codec"

To those of you who say "what do business users need to play DVD's for?" I say "have you ever traveled on business? what kind of jerks would your company be if they didn't even let you watch a friggin' movie on your laptop?"

But more seriously, there are business purposes for this, even without the employee perk of entertainment. Enterprise customers often have videos that are on DVD's that they want people to watch! Crazy, I know, that DVD's could hold stuff other than movies, and that some people in business could get some use from that.... but it happens!

Now, let's see if we can get MS to agree to let us use the DVD playback in Vista for free until they can ship Win7. :-)