Windows 7 + Windows Live: Living better on the road

Kate Isler

If you've ever seen a foreign commercial for Windows, you've seen the work of Kate Isler. She's responsible for all Windows consumer strategy marketing in every market outside the U.S. And as you might imagine, Kate travels a lot. In fact, she spends over 50 percent of her time on the road.

I caught up with Kate during one of her brief spells at the Microsoft office in Redmond, WA, to talk about how she uses Windows 7 and Windows Live to stay in touch while jaunting around the world. And I don't want to sound like a bad infomercial, but really, I'm pretty amazed at how much she relies on Windows 7 and Windows Live both professionally and personally.

For a traveler, there's almost nothing more important than a good Internet connection—and that means not just having an Internet connection available but being able to connect to it. "I cannot emphasize how much Windows 7 has made connecting easier," Kate says. "I've lived through years of hoping I could connect. You know, hoping you have the right settings and that you don't have to restart. Now? I don't worry about it."

Before Windows Live SkyDrive, sharing files used to be much harder. Kate produces from 10 to 18 TV spots for seven different countries or regions each season, and many files are too big to email and hard to access if they're on a different company's network. Kate calls the free storage on SkyDrive a fantastic way to share because you can upload documents virtually anywhere you're online, set permissions to the right people—and that's it. "It reduces having to deal with firewalls or permissions issues between our corporate networks. It's almost instantaneous."

When Kate talks about something being almost instantaneous, she's talking about uploading the files and about how to work with them. That's because she is a big fan of the video chat feature in Windows Live Messenger. She and her team members use informal video chats a lot—like most people use the phone or email—to talk through documents or conduct one-to-one meetings.

For example, the night before we chatted, she had a six-hour pre-production meeting with her virtual team—about 25 people in Brazil, China, and France. They set it up as a large video Live Meeting, but many people also had individual Messenger chats going on at the same time. Technically, it was a virtual meeting, but it felt like it was in-person. "It was pretty amazing; we had different people relaying information from three separate continents, and the technology made it seem like we were all right there."

Kate's family—her husband and their three sons—lives in Redmond, WA. During our chat, I kept coming back to the fact that she's on the road so much. Is it hard? How does she stay in touch? Again, it comes down to daily video chats, which she says are far better (and, frankly, cheaper) than phone conversations. "I love that it brings you so much closer. You can see someone's face and you don't miss the nuances of the conversation. And kids aren't good at describing things during a phone conversation—they need to show you. With video chats, you are there and they can show you."

So her husband holds the webcam so their soccer-playing son can show her how he scored his big goal. Another son actually shows her his latest paper, holding it up to the camera so she can see the big red A on it. For their part, they can visually see how she's doing or look at pictures she took that day. It's a nightly ritual, and it seems to me that it would be incredibly comforting.

Kate also uses Windows 7 in a much more prosaic way: for on-the-road entertainment. She jokes that she spends so much time traveling that she's seen all the in-flight movies. But her Windows Media Center entertainment system makes it possible to take content with her. Here's how she does it: She uses Windows Live Mesh to sync up the movies and recorded TV shows she's downloaded with her travel laptop. Then she can watch recorded content on the plane, or feel just a little more at home in a strange hotel room.

Kate and her family have lived in Germany, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and the U.S., so they have friends all over the world. It's no surprise that they use web chats to stay in touch. As one example, they have some friends from Germany, and the kids in each family chat all the time. "The children never even consider the fact that they are far apart and that they haven't actually seen each other in person for about three years now," says Kate. "They just say, ‘Yeah, but we talk to them all the time.'"

And just like with work, they can share files really easily—only in this case, it's usually pictures. Everyone uses SkyDrive to share and store pictures, so even the most far-flung friends can see what's going on with the family. The added bonus? Kate and her husband have more pictures of their boys than they would through formal shots—because of course, you can never take a good photo of a teenager.

On a more philosophical note, Kate observes that technologies like Windows 7 and Windows Live are changing the way we think about tangible objects and connections. Anything is accessible virtually anywhere; it's not tied to a device or to something that you actually have with you. "The idea of getting your stuff anywhere and anytime is really a whole new way of thinking," Kate notes. "You don't have to schlep stuff around or worry about something you jotted down on a piece of paper anymore."

And because you can store the important things—from photos to work documents—online, you can share them more easily with family and colleagues. Windows 7, Windows Live, and the cloud remove the barriers that make us feel like we're far apart. The ironic thing is that Kate and I chatted the "old-fashioned" way—by telephone, even though we were in the same city. "Next time," says Kate, "let's do this by video chat."