It’s been 6 years already?! We had our good times and bad times but what I remember most is hard work, and the joy of reading ‘thank you’ emails from happy customers…

We hoped to release the minor update we planned for ASV today, on its anniversary – but we weren’t able to do it. ‘Lets fix this too, it will take only a few hours’ were the evil words caused this. Anyway, it should only take a couple of days more…

Today, I thought about the past and the future, and realized this: We (Manitu Group) are small (We are only 4 people), and we will stay small. We will never make a few million dollars and be able to retire this way. Thank god we do not receive 100 orders a day, we won’t be able to cope with it. In the end, we are happy doing what we are doing and that’s all what really matters…

Though technically I’m the boss around here, being 4 people, we all feel like we don’t have any bosses – and that’s great. We are in Istanbul, Turkey, most of our customers are from the US – so we have a good excuse to wake up late and stay up until 4am. I usually arrive at the office at 2pm and that’s considered normal…

I’m 36 now, I’ve been programming since my mother brought home a Commodore VIC-20. You could easily get an out of memory error while typing a few pages of BASIC with it. (Later I bought myself a Sinclair ZX-81, it was worse in that respect). Now, my mobile phone has way better specs than the best computer I owned 15 years ago (It was a 386SX 16MHz with 2MB RAM and a 80MB harddisk, no sound card, no CD-ROM, multimedia PCs weren’t around then. It was my second PC), with the exception of the keyboard layout and screen size in inches…

So far, it’s been a fun journey. Thanks to ASV which allowed me to quit my day job where I had a boss and had to get up really early in the morning. Thanks to Macromedia (now Adobe) for making Flash… And, most importantly, thanks to our customers for their trust and continued support for a small software-house in Turkey.

It’s been 6 years already?! I guess time passes quickly when you are enjoying yourself…

4 years ago, on May 16th 2000, we released our flagship product ASV (Action Script Viewer – the first ever SWF decompiler [also called Flash decompiler] and resource extractor). Flash 4 was the latest Flash version at the time…

ASV 1.0 was so simple an application that not only it was nothing that can be compared to ASV 4.06 we have today, I quickly dismissed the idea of posting a screenshot here

At Manitu Group we are all programmers. There are no graphics people or even marketing people. So how do we handle marketing at all?

Our solutions involve treating our customers as we, ourselves, would have liked to be treated. Privacy of our customers is important to us at least as much as our own privacy is important to us. Our software do not have installers (because they mess with the system inevitably), do not try to connect to internet and call back ‘home’, do not write to system registry… Because that’s the way we would like to have any software ourselves.

Any support request is top priority for us, and we receive many ‘thank you’ emails for our prompt support, because that’s the way we’d like our support requests be handled…

To this day, we never had ‘promotions’ or a ‘sale’. The reason is that we think it will not be fair to our customers who have purchased the software just a day before the sale. I, for one, wouldn’t like to find out that I paid more for anything and it feels worse that I paid earlier; it doesn’t feel right… We try to add features to our software instead. That way, a new customer gets more for his money and current customers get the new features for free along with fixes.

But today, celebrating the 4th year of ASV, I will be offering a 25% discount for ASV to the readers of my blog, which is good for 7 days. This offer is available only through this link.

I’d like to thank to all the Macromedians and Flash community for their support and acceptance of the tool which was seen as a hacker tool by some for some time.

Happy release day, ASV!