 Fred Vogelstein is a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, where he covers the convergence of technology and media. His new book is Dogfight, how Apple and Google went to war and started a revolution. Fred Vogelstein, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. Do you think the Obamacare website would have worked if it had been run and set up by a private company? Do you really think Amazon or IBM could set up a website for the government that- Oh absolutely, I'm not saying that they should. You do believe that Amazon, IBM, Google would have done a better job at setting up these health exchanges over the internet than our government could? Purely technically, absolutely. You know, I wish that weren't the case, but it is. I think they could have done technically a better job. Whether or not that led to other issues, I don't have the slightest idea, but purely from a technical point of view, yeah, absolutely I think we would have a much better outcome. I was an early user of Netflix's streaming videos. They weren't handling 55 million new customers when they started out. They probably had a million users and very few choices and it didn't work so well. It took a year for Netflix to get their streaming video up and running. The idea that any entity could launch a brand new website that will service 55 million uninsured Americans and have it work within a month to say that Google or Amazon could do it better, I just think anybody who's had any experience with these companies, you can't get them on the phone. If you have a problem with Netflix, they won't answer their phone, Google doesn't answer their phone. There's no accountability for the consumer. So absolutely, we're not talking. So I want to push back on you a little bit. I want to be clear, I'm not talking about the accountability issue in any way, shape or form. I think you're absolutely correct that all the tech companies try to spend as little as they possibly can on customer support and as little as they can having people on the other end of the phone line answering questions. The only thing you were asking me was whether I thought from a purely technical perspective, whether or not I thought that Amazon or Google or any of these places could have come up with a website and built an infrastructure and tested it to be sure that it could handle the load. What I can tell you is I'm sure that it would have gone better than what has happened now. I could not disagree with you more. If you left it to Silicon Valley, there would be no internet, wasn't it DARPA that created the internet? The government provides the most efficient service for the most people. Silicon Valley really is in the business of being in business and servicing the people with the most money. With Obamacare, you're trying to provide services to the largest number of people without really worrying about how much money they have. I don't think Silicon Valley is equipped to deliver utilitarian services to the population. I'm just saying could they have kept the site up? The question you asked was a very narrow one, which was could they have figured out a way to handle the load better than the government? I think they could have. I remember Amazon's Black Fridays after Thanksgiving when people started shopping online. I remember Amazon not being able to handle the surge of requests. I remember all that too, but most of all that stuff happened five, ten, fifteen years ago. The telephone was invented more than a hundred years ago and I have an iPhone. I literally was told by AT&T that they couldn't handle the service in my area. So it seems to me something as simple as telephone service. There's an example of a business that's been around for more than a century and private enterprise still can't figure it out. Well I guess it kind of depends on what you would call figuring it out and even what you would call a telephone. So I mean I still remember when spending ten minutes calling New York to California would cost fifty dollars. I don't even think a call like that today would cost fifteen cents. And some would argue the quality of the call.