A little more than 10 years ago, I stumbled out of a liberal arts college with a mediocre GPA into a job with a weekly business journal with a smallish circulation in my hometown of Memphis, Tenn. I’d never studied business or journalism, and I came from a family of academics. I didn’t even really understand what a stock was. But there was something I loved about it.

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Back in May 2008, I was on top of the world. Viewers were soaring for my newly launched Yahoo (YHOO) show, TechTicker, my book was about to come out and was boasting a beautifully low three-digit Amazon (AMZN) rank, several of my BusinessWeek columns had been among the most read stories on the site, and traffic on this blog was doubling month-over-month. (Sure it had only been open two months, but details like that don’t matter when you’re on top of the world.)

I was also in New York doing a slew of press interviews for the launch of my book. Not even a torrent of rain and a windstorm that eviscerated my umbrella could dampen my spirits as I Mary Tyler Moore’d all over Manhattan in a DVF dress feeling like I’d turned the world on with my ability to tell a great story and enviable access to people whose stories actually mattered. And let’s be clear: No one had handed me all this.

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The Internet revolutionized the distribution of software–perhaps a bit too much. The Web brought a new, cheaper method for getting software into the hands of users, but in doing so may have killed one of the best models in Silicon Valley history.

At the outset, the Internet ushered in an exciting new era of corporate software. On-demand computing–its poster child Salesforce.com’s grinning, rosy-cheeked Marc Benioff sporting his once trademark “No Software” button–promised low-priced, convenient delivery of applications.

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I agree with the popular take on Sarah Lacy’s Mark Zuckerberg interview at SXSW to this degree: The audience was revolting. Lacy threw an unbecomingly petulant tantrum onstage. But the Twitter reaction was equally self-indulgent. The debates over her performance obscured the man who should have been under the microscope: Zuckerberg. As a speaker, Facebook’s CEO is trying to model himself after Steve Jobs. He’s gotten help from Bill Clinton’s former speaking coach. But so far, all he’s learned is the fine art of saying nothing.

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So I’m still in shock at what happened a few hours ago at SXSW during the Sarah Lacy interview of Mark Zuckerberg. I’d like to be nice about it and I feel for Sarah, but to be brutally honest I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a complete and utter train wreck of an interview before.

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