Perhaps you wonder what’s wrong with the world of business. Why would someone take a useful thing, destroy it, and build another entirely different thing on top of the remains of that formerly useful thing? Wouldn’t it be easier to just build a new thing without going through the trouble of destroying that old, useful thing first? These are the thoughts that I have in mind when I consider the case of the formerly useful Deja News. I finally got around to reading Janelle Brown’s article about Deja News, and I wasn’t surprised to discover that they hired a new CEO last December who backburnered all the good stuff about Deja News, and put a bunch of crap in its place. (He also moved the company headquarters from Austin to New York … the bastard probably just didn’t want to live in Texas.) So now we have an overdesigned site with no useful purpose that insults practical users by loading slowly, where there was once a nice, useful resource. Why couldn’t the new CEO have just started a new company to express his misbegotten vision of what a Web site should be like? The people behind these companies can thank their lucky stars that the world is full of even bigger idiots than they who are willing to throw money at them while they pursue their flights of fancy. The bottom line is that 90% of the “Internet companies” are doing nothing but peddling crap. It’s a good thing that the market for crap is huge. By the way, in case you’re writing the business plan for the next lame-ass Internet business, people actually use the Internet to do things besides shop.