Zet Universe originally was envisioned by our founder, Daniel Kornev, during the development of the Productivity Future Vision 2019 video made by Office Labs Envisioning Lab between 2007 and 2009.

First prototype was created in several May nights in 2009. It took 2.5 years for our founder to make a decision to leave corporate world and establish Zet Universe, Inc., as the company, to productize those original ideas, and since that time we've shipped several versions of the product. As we are moving forward with the new iteration of the product, we find it invaluable to look back at its history.

Today we are excited to share several product demos, never shared before, created between 2009 and late 2013.

Special thanks to Alexander Popov for his narration in this video.

Update (2/20/2022): This blog post was updated in February 2022 to refresh links to two original Productivity Future Vision videos that were removed from the web by Microsoft sometimes in 2020-2022, as well as to share a screenshot of a Spatial Desk in reality built by our Founder in early 2021.

Today you know Zet Universe not only as a product, but also as a long journey towards creation of a true spatial user environment, designed to make work with large amounts of information intuitive and simple.

Originally, Zet Universe was inspired by our founder's previous work at Microsoft (2007-2010), made in collaboration with the Office Labs and Office Labs Envisioning teams.

Between 2007 and 2009, those teams worked on many aspects of the future of Productivity, including but not limited to new device form factors (be that new phones, tablets, walls, or big desktops), new kinds of team software (precursors to Slack and Yammer, spatial environments, etc.), and so on.

Some of those ideas were released by Office Labs via the (now defunct) website officelabs.com, and experiments like "Canvas for OneNote" became truly popular among the Office power users. But, certainly, the biggest visible outcome of that work was the Productivity Future Vision video itself, shown below.

When one looks at the modern world, one of the first things she immediately sees is the increasing complexity of everything: 

• organizations that spread across the entire world adapting to the needs of the local economies and cultures; 
• simple jobs being taken by computers and robots rendering remaining jobs increasingly more complex, requiring us to learn entirely new things every day; 
• network economics changing the entire concept of ownership and rent, collaborative work, and productivity. 

All these changes require us to learn and adapt to the new world, and as it was said by the Red Queen in the classic “Alice in the Wonderland” (by Lewis Carrol), to simply stay where you are you should run, and to run you should run twice faster. This is applied to all aspects of our lives, including both personal and professional ones. 

For instance, one has not only to get a formal education, but to continue being on top of the chosen field, and for that, tracking of new articles, works, theories, practices is, indeed, the necessary ingredient of success. Even to keep being relevant in the organization one has to be in know of what’s happening inside the organization, and, even more important, to be in the know of the organization’s business, whatever it would be, and its customers. We are no longer simply acquiring knowledge, friends, customers, instead, we create and connect to networks of knowledge, friends, and customers.

This white paper is also available in the PDF format via this link: The Post-PC World Future Vision – Zet Universe, Inc. 

It’s almost a week after Microsoft’s exciting Windows 8 Consumer Preview launch and it’s a good time for reflection on usage experience. It’s the time to share some thoughts on what’s good, what’s bad and what could be the Next Big Thing of the Post-PC World. Why Microsoft brought such a radical change to Windows to life? As usual, let’s start with history lessons.

From late 1960s the dream about a natural interaction with computer was transformed into the meme of the “Desktop” metaphor invented in PARC, widespread across all operating systems. Its conceptual architecture became a “de-facto” standard in the IT industry. The state of HCI in this area was put almost into the stasis for almost 30 years. A recent introduction of devices with touch screens and intelligent voice assistants like iPhone, Microsoft Surface and Siri, gave a new energy to this area of HCI. Beauty and art of intuitive direct interaction with content in comparison to an abstract mouse-based paradigm captured the so-called Y and Z generations and transformed the computing into a new and bright world of natural, personalized user experiences.