MJ is headed into the Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend. ESPN is counting down with the top 23 Michael Jordan moments.

When I was growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I was lucky enough to have a membership one summer to The Multiplex health club. This is where the Bulls used to practice before they built their own practice facility.

And once I had the chance to rebound for MJ after practice. He’d often stay late and just shoot around. Sometimes he’d let the local kids rebound for him. One time I was just there by myself so he motioned to me and I started rebounding. I felt so honored. And the guy didn’t miss.

Sometimes he’d play a little fake one-on-one with you too. He’d never ever let you hit a basket though. He loved rejecting you and talking trash. It was all in great fun, of course.

The thing that always blew me away about watching Jordan, Pippen, Horace Grant, and Oakley up close was just how fast they were. These guys were giants, but they moved faster and reacted faster than any humans I’d ever seen. Light years faster. It was a whole new level.

Anyway, I’ll never forget those moments. Good to reminisce.

Hey, even at 46 he’s still got the fade away:

Last week we were dragged over the coals — and rightfully so — for failing to communicate clearly regarding a security exploit that was discovered in early August.

It turned out that the issue was related to Ruby on Rails. The exploit affected multiple products (ours and others). After the initial investigation, and escalation to the Rails security team, the root cause was patched within a few days of the initial report. We then updated our apps, tested, and deployed updates.

Fixed promptly, communicated poorly

Problem was, we did a terrible job communicating from start to finish. We didn’t communicate well with the person who initially reported the vulnerability, we didn’t communicate well internally, and we didn’t communicate well publicly.

Perfect security is a moving target. New exploits and security discoveries pop up over time. They occur in OSes, web browsers, frameworks, embedded systems, and commercial software. Anyone who’s in the software business has to deal with these issues from time to time. What matters is that issues are taken seriously, delegated properly, handled appropriately based on severity and priority, and communicated clearly with all parties involved. When someone reports a security issue, they’re reporting it because they want to help. It’s important for us to keep that in mind.

Getting better

After ultimately reviewing what went wrong, we began to rework our internal process for dealing with security reports. This is a longer term project which we’ve just begun. Something we could do in the short term was review how we communicate publicly about security on our main security page on 37signals.com.

After a fresh slap in the face (which is definitely a healthy thing from time to time), it became clear that the words we were using were the wrong words. We weren’t setting the right expectations. Some of the lines were cringeworthy. It just wasn’t us. I don’t think any of us ever liked the way this page was written, but we never got around to changing it. Now was the time.

This weekend the New York Times published a piece called Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit. The piece focused on Evernote, a web-based and smart-phone based application for taking notes, snapping pictures, and storing stuff you want to remember later. The following critique isn’t about Evernote (it’s an impressive product which a lot of people love). It’s about the incredibly low bar for “success” in our industry and how the tech-business press perpetuates the perception. (ugh, did I just turn into one of those who blames “the media”? Yes, on this one, I did.)

Let’s erase one claim right off the bat. The headline, “Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit”, is misleading and downright false as it relates to the subject of the story. Near the end of the piece Phil Libin, the chief executive of Evernote, says they are generating about $79,000/month in revenue. Then the article goes on to say “By January 2011, Mr. Libin projects, the company will break even.”

$79,000/month and they won’t break even until January 2011. So every day they’re losing money until 2011. And the title of the piece is “Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit”. What? How can the Times let a headline like this slide?

Then yesterday a piece pops up on Gigaom called How Freemium Can Work for Your Startup. This piece references the “Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit” New York Times piece. Om Malik says “And it in reading Damon’s article, the qualities of a successful freemium product finally became clear to me.” Then in the next paragraph Om acknowledges that Evernote doesn’t generate enough revenue to turn a profit. Later he says “I’m sure there are many more ways to build great freemium applications, but one [Evernote] has stood out for me above all the others.” The product may be excellent, but until their business cracks a profit I don’t see how Om can say it’s a model for how to build a freemium application (or a business).

This pattern — “success” based on forecasted future success instead of current success — shows up all over the tech-business press. Instead of metrics like “they make more money than they spend” we see stuff like “user count growth” and “followers” and “impressions” and “friends” and “visits” qualify success. Whenever you see someone piling big numbers into made up metrics, it’s a diversion. They want you to think that this time it’s different. But like Judge Judy says, “If it doesn’t make sense it isn’t true.”

Don’t agree? Would you take your next paycheck in page views? or users? or followers? or visitors? or eyeballs (remember that one from the 90s)? Go down to the corner store and plunk down a million impressions for a gum ball. They’ll probably call the cops.

If there was an airline that flew more passengers than anyone else, but lost money on each one, would we call it a success? If there was a restaurant that served more people than anyone else, but lost money on each meal served, would we call it a success? If there was a store that sold more product than anyone else, but took a loss on each one, would we call it a success? Would the business press hold these companies up as business model successes? Would anyone? Interesting, maybe. Promising, sure. But successful? Then what the hell is going on with the coverage of our industry?

What’s the rush? Why not wait until their business is proven? Wouldn’t the Evernote story have been 10x better if they’d actually been able to say “We’re making money with this model. It works.” Wouldn’t the New York Times be doing its readers a service by providing insight into a proven model with a proven example? Instead, we get an article titled “turn a profit” about a company that is over a year away from meeting that definition. There are thousands of interesting internet-based businesses that are actually turning a profit — and I know of dozens running the freemium model that are deep in the black. Pick one and write a great true story. Why all the fiction?

It still blows me away that David’s talk at Startup School 2008 was met with such enthusiasm (I know David was surprised too). The talk was simple. Come up with a product, charge money for it, make more money than it costs to run it, and you turn a profit! This is the formula that’s been in place since business began. Yet in front of a group of new tech entrepreneurs it seemed like a revelation, a brand new story never told before. David said people were coming up to him in droves after the speech thanking him for opening their eyes. Who closed them?

So I guess what ultimately bothers me most about this New York Times piece, and many other pieces just like it (see TechCrunch daily), is the example that’s being set for the next generation of entrepreneurs. They’re seeing business success defined as “the projections say we’ll profitable later”. They’re constantly being exposed to excuses. They’re being taught that profits are these things that only happen one day far away. That’s just wrong.

Thought it would be fun to share the very different sketch styles of the designers at 37signals. They range from very neat to a mess (mine).

Jamie Dihiansan

Jamie’s sketches are neat, well organized, and readable. They’re fairly high resolution and anyone who’s looking at them can decipher them without assistance. They also often contain supporting materials – ideas, questions, explanations, and goals.

A few days ago Matt posted a chart of copyediting marks that we’re encountering while we review the copyedited version of REWORK.

Originally I had the same reaction as many others: “Wow, so old school. Isn’t there software for that? What about Word/Pages track changes functionality?”

But as I’ve been going over the marked up version of the paper manuscript, I’ve really come to appreciate the handwritten red pen edits. I find them more informative and ultimately more readable than the made-by-machine track changes edits.

For example, here’s a scan of one of the marked up pages of REWORK:

I like that the original text isn’t obscured or changed inline. It’s marked up. The edits are, for the most part, overlaid on top of the original text. Any changes are distinctly different than the original text. This isn’t the case with traditional machine-made track changes edits. Those changes look the same as the original. They’re on the same layer. I find that distracting.

For example, to suggest a capitalized “A”, you’d triple-underline the letter by hand. But on a computer you’d actually replace the lowercase “a” with an uppercase “A”, but the remnant “a” would remain. Over the course of many sentences and many changes, the machine-made track changes edits blend in too much with the original text. It becomes hard to quickly spot changes. And it becomes hard to actually read the original to the changes.

I find the top example (by hand) clearer and easier to read than the second example (by machine).

Lesson learned: Don’t be so quick to dismiss the old in favor of the new just because the new seems like it should be better. There’s a lot of subtlety that can be communicated in a pen stroke that can’t be fit into a rigid digital rule.