It's not clear exactly when it dawned on us, but only recently we realized that in April Strata celebrated its 10th year as a company.  With the releases of StudioPro 2.5, the new Extensions, and VideoShop 4.0/3D all in rapid succession, and events like the Red Rock Revival and NAB, things have been clipping along too fast to look backwards.  More than ever, it seems, our time is almost exclusively focused on the future. We've always had a forward-leaning bent, but we need to take time once in a while to look at where we've been and how far we've come.

This first ten years has been quite a ride.  We began with not much more than a vision of serving creative professionals, our knowledge of what was needed in 3D software, and a crudy little office in an industrial park in Hurricane, Utah.  We used to have to come in each morning and clean off our desks after the mice had left their little "calling cards" during the night.  We ran off of adrenaline, Pepsi, and sheer optimism as we put together the first working versions of Strata Vision.  Our first real marketing launching pad came in 1989 at MacWorld Boston.  We had pretty much hocked everything to finance our booth and travel and had no idea what to expect.  We still have vivid memories of painstakingly duplicating the program disks on our desktop Macs and using a hairdryer to shrink-wrap the boxes.  We sold 120 copies of Vision at that debut show and were pretty psyched about it.

It wasn't long before we'd left the mice behind, moved into better digs in St. George (the "big city" in Southern Utah terms), and brought together some very talented individuals to form an incredible team.  Over the next few years, we watched the demand for Vision, and then StudioPro, grow phenomenally and by 1994, we'd captured a major market segment as artists, multimedia designers, illustrators, architects, animators, and a host of others caught on to what powerful 3D tools we were able to provide.  It wasn't long, also, before overseas sales were climbing dramatically -- especially in Japan where we opened a Strata branch office in 1995.  We realized early that we'd better learn how to say "hai" and "domo arigato" and which sushi we liked, and we were right.  Japan has proven to be our biggest foreign market and Strata dominates the 3D scene in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Of course, we had our share of bumps along the ride, and some were bigger than others.  No company sails through the business cycle without encountering some turbulence.  We had to make some hard decisions in 1996 and 1997 as we rolled out the new 2.x generation of StudioPro while simultaneously dealing with some internal financial challenges.  Certainly, with the benefit of hindsight, itís easy to see that some of those decisions took us off course.  At the same time, though, many of those hard-made choices cleared the decks and cleaned off the barnacles.  The code base that was developed for the new generation of StudioPro has allowed us to push that product farther and faster than we ever could have done with the older version.  Yes, we pushed the envelope, and yes there were wrinkles, but the launch of 2.1 last fall put us back in the trade winds again.

One of the reasons that we started this business, and the major reason we're still in it, is the satisfaction we get from sparking the digital creative community and the wonderfully gifted individuals that make it up. We have always meant it when we say our central mission is "empowering the creative environment" -- in fact, we mean it so much we've trade-marked that phrase.  That's truly what Strata is all about, serving the creative professionals that form our user base.  That's also why we do everything we can to fulfill the promises we make with our users.  And to our great satisfaction, most "Strata users" repay that commitment with their loyalty.

Now, ten years after moving the operation out of the kitchen, we're in the best position we've ever been in to bring our vision to even more people. StudioPro is humming, and just keeps getting better.  VideoShop is poised to make big waves in the desktop DV world.  The new rev of MediaPaint is right around the corner and should find a great reception in both the Macintosh and PC markets.  And that's the direction we're headed -- a totally cross-platform company.  By the end of 1998, we aim to have all four Strata products running and shipping for Windows, as well as the Mac OS.

In our view, the things that have brought us to this point are the unwavering commitment to that original vision, the talents and hard work of a lot of extraordinary people here at Strata, and the faith and trust of users like you.  But enough reminiscing.  Now its time to start working on the next decade.