In this week's special episode of Industry Focus: Tech, Dylan Lewis talks with Fool.com's Dan Kline about the last 10 years in consumer technology -- the trends that flopped and faded away, and the ones that became status quo. The guys look back on the rapid adoption of the smartphone (and the total redefinition of what we think of as a smartphone); how T-Mobile (TMUS +0.87%) changed how much we spend on those phones; how Netflix (NFLX +0.09%) changed cable and brought us to the overabundance of a la carte options we have today; how Apple (AAPL 0.38%) dropped the ball on digital assistants, and Amazon (AMZN 1.66%) picked it up; some once-promising technologies that kind of just fizzled out; and much more.
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This video was recorded on Dec. 13, 2019.
Dylan Lewis: Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day. It's Friday, Dec. 13, and we're looking back at the decade in consumer tech. I'm your host, Dylan Lewis, and I've got fool.com's Dan Kline with me on Skype. Dan, what is going on, man?
Dan Kline: I am doing this podcast from my room on the Navigator of the Seas, about to head out to the Bahamas.
Lewis: Hopping on a cruise ship on Friday the 13th, huh? [laughs]
Kline: [laughs] Yeah, would have done a murder-themed cruise, but they didn't seem that cool with that.
Lewis: No, no, I think people are trying to break that association. Well, I'm happy that you can call in and join me. Kind of a testament to the advancements in tech over the last decade or so that you're able to, thousands of miles away on a cruise ship.
We're looking at, basically, 2010 to 2019, where we are now and what has changed, what's gotten us to the point where we are in technology. But first, before we get into the actual tech, Dan, a quick 10-year challenge question for you. What were you doing a decade ago?
Kline: You set these things up to make me look 1,000 years old.
Lewis: [laughs] That is not true! I'm playing into the theme, Dan!
Kline: [laughs] So, 10 years ago, my wife and I had a 5-year-old -- 3 to 6 was probably the worst, most difficult years. And I was running a giant toy store in Connecticut. Much of my management was done on my BlackBerry, which I used to not only communicate with all of my employees, but also to monitor our security cameras. And when I was home, I believe I was playing a lot of PlayStation 3.
Lewis: I think there are a lot of listeners that probably heard BlackBerry and thought, "That's a name I haven't heard in a long time."
Kline: I was a big fan until the almost bitter end.
Lewis: Yeah, they certainly had their moment in the sun. We're going to talk about them in a minute.
As for me, 10 years ago, I was midway through my sophomore year of college living in Boston, and just taking in as much Ultimate Frisbee as I possibly could. That took over my college years. I played a ton of Frisbee. I didn't get my first smartphone until, I think, 2012, so, a couple years after that. I was a little bit of a late adopter to the smartphone market. I think that that's probably got to be one of the major stories of the past 10 years, Dan, is just how huge smartphones have gotten, and how widely available, and how much cheaper they really have become.
Kline: There was a whole interim period, let's call it pre-iPhone, where the BlackBerry was expensive. I had a BlackBerry because as a writer, it was something I could actually write on. But I remember through the years, I experimented with all sorts of different phones, where a keyboard flipped out, or there were all sorts, like it slid up and there was a keyboard, semi-smartphones that sort of did some stuff, but didn't really do that many things. Back then, most people weren't using them, aside from businesspeople who had Research In Motion BlackBerrys, which was, what, about 20% of the market?
Lewis: Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I looked at the market share in 2010 and now present. Nokia dominated the smartphone space. They had about 40% market share. Research In Motion, the one who manufactured BlackBerry, had about 19%, good for second place in that market. They are nowhere to be seen when you look at market share nowadays.
Kline: Yeah. The iPhone changed the game and upped the ante. To have a non-smartphone, you have to make a decision. My father-in-law and mother-in-law both have non-smartphones because they don't know how to use any of the features. You have to go to a Walmart or a special store to find something that isn't even just a basic Android smartphone, it's truly just a flip phone.
Lewis: Yeah. And while the smartphone era did not begin during this 10-year period that we're talking about, it's kind of late in the aughts that we started to see smartphones coming out -- I believe 2007 for the iPhone -- Apple and Samsung truly dominated this period, and I think the middle of the decade, in particular, that's when you really start to see the two of them taking on tons and tons of market share. Back in 2010, I think Samsung had like 5% market share.
The story for a long time was, you had two dominant players, slightly different strategies, they were both able to make some money on smartphones. Apple really was the one who was able to make it a luxury product and collect a lot of the margins and a lot of the profits in the smartphone industry. You move forward a couple years closer to where we are now, I don't think they quite have the stranglehold that they used to have on this market. We're seeing some other players hop in, Dan.
Kline: Yeah. The problem is -- well, not a problem unless you're Apple or Samsung -- the basic, cheap, get-it-free-with-your-plan Android smartphone is pretty good. And you're starting to see features like large screens, things that used to be you had to pay to get -- mobile payment, thumbprint recognition, facial recognition -- those are things you're seeing on very inexpensive phones. I have the latest iPhone, and they tell me the camera is different and it can do all sorts of magical things. Other than the fact that the battery lasts longer, I don't feel like my phone does anything appreciably better than my previous, I don't know, three iPhones. So, you're at a case where, as a consumer, to walk in and buy the brand you're never thinking of, it's not as crazy as it used to seem.
Lewis: It's funny that you mentioned all of the more bizarre form factors that were out 10 years ago or so as we were really starting to get into this space. Over the last five years, I think we've codified what we expect a smartphone to look like. For the most part, it's going to look like an iPhone or some version of that. We're starting to see some more experimentation with folding screens, and there might be some amazing possibilities there. But after all of that, after the slide-out keyboards, the Sidekick, all of these different renderings of what a phone might look like, we got ourselves to a rounded-corner rectangle. That's kind of what we all agreed upon, Dan.
Kline: Yeah. I think the rise of the phablet, which has put pressure on the tablet industry, has forced a form factor that's based on being able to watch a movie while you're traveling. Your phone is a screen now more than it's a phone. And I'm not sure I want an oval screen, a rounded screen, a screen that pops up and becomes a trapezoid. It just feels like you want it to look like a little TV in your hand.
Lewis: I think in 2030, Dan, we'll look back and think, "Oh, what a quaint idea, the idea of a TV in our hand." Surely by then, we'll have something else.
Kline: By then we'll have eyeball implants.
Lewis: Of course. Yeah, we all know it's coming at some point.
One of the really big changes in this space that I think really affected the economics of these businesses is, during the last 10 years, we went from having a pretty tight relationship between the smartphone manufacturers and the wireless carriers. Where, very often, you had subsidies that were attached to the phone plan that you had, which made it pretty easy and pretty straightforward to get a new phone every two years. So, you had this implanted upgrade cycle in your head as a consumer where you knew, "OK, I have this phone. In about two years or so, I'll get a new one." And that was really imprinted in people's heads because the financial incentives were there.
You fast-forward a couple years, and you get later into this decade, and those incentives, those subsidies, started to go away thanks to one carrier in particular. And now, you can't find them anywhere.
Kline: Yeah. T-Mobile was the leader in this. Basically, what their CEO, John Legere, came out and said was, "Look, these aren't really subsidies. You're getting a free phone, but you're paying $25 more a month for your plan. How about I just charge you less for the plan, and I'll finance the phone for you, zero interest if you have decent credit, but you'll know that's an $800 phone. You're going to pay in whatever installments." And then they came up with different ways to incentivize trading in. T-Mobile lets you trade in after you've paid off half your device, and you might have to pay the difference, but usually, it'll be pretty close with what it's worth and what you've already paid. If you're underwater on that, you can pay the difference.
I still upgrade every year, but most people, because they know what they're actually spending, it's like a car. They see the benefit of holding it once it's off-payment. So, if you keep your phone an extra year, an extra two years in some cases, you sort of get a free phone for that period. And there's not a lot of reason to upgrade from, say, an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 11.
Lewis: Yeah, I think it's funny how when you itemize costs like that, all of a sudden, you start to reevaluate your behavior a little bit. When you unbundle all those things and you can start to really look at them, a lot of people that are making some more intentional personal finance decisions are going to use their phones a little bit longer. And that really wreaked havoc on the smartphone industry. We went from having this very nice, stable, predictable two-year upgrade cycle to people deciding, "You know, this phone still works. I'm going to hold onto it and have it for two and a half years, three years." That was something that Apple really had to deal with going back to 2017, 2018.
Kline: It's been a drag on Apple. I think they're finally breaking away from their "every other year is a big update, and in the off year, it's just sort of a small update." There's a lot of rumors of four or five different phones next year. They're trying to make it an event each year. I know that my situation is a little different. I have a wife and a teenager, so basically, they keep my old phones after they've been paid off. My wife usually has two phones ago of mine, and my son will have whatever phone she had previously. So it's not like I'm buying three new phones every two years; I'm really just buying one for me every year. But the average person -- I don't think you could tell the difference, except the camera looks physically different, on the iPhone 11 versus the iPhone X. There's not a lot of reason, there hasn't been a lot of innovation, and I'm not sure what that next piece is going to be, if it's going to be 3D rendering, or some sort of projecting, or light keyboards. But right now, there's nothing that would make the non-professional in this space -- I feel like, because of my job, I should have the current phone. The regular person is not going to need to do that.
Lewis: I think the biggest reason that people upgrade their phones is because the battery life just can't handle, it can't stick around and do everything that it needs to do as the operating systems and as apps become more demanding with the operating system upgrades. It's something that people seem to be a little bit more forced into than something that they're excited to do because they're getting this discount with their wireless provider the way they used to.
Kline: Well, there's a bit of planned obsolescence there. When they force you into a new operating system, that new operating system is generally not optimal for the battery on your older phone. So, you might have had a phone that you had to be somewhat wary of charging during the day, to becoming very wary. I'll say, with the iPhone 11, I used to have my [iPhone X] in a battery case. And now, without a battery case, I get about the same amount of battery power, where I can eke out, if I'm spending a day at the theme parks, when I'm getting into my car at 9 p.m., I still have 10%, 12% left. That's pretty impressive.
Lewis: Yeah, that's a that's kind of a testament right there to why people upgrade. I kind of went through the same thing with the XR, where I wound up basically rediscovering that I enjoyed my phone, and I lost all this anxiety over whether it was charged and being in low-power mode. It was nice for my quality of life. I didn't like spending all that money to make it happen.
I think, looking out over the last 10 years too in the phone space, one of the things that has changed pretty dramatically is how people have used their phones. We've seen, over the last 10 years, more and more voice assistants, more digital assistants hopping into the space. I think phones were one of the first spaces where that happened, but it's also bled into other markets.
Kline: Yeah. I think phones created the demand for the voice-activated speakers, the Amazon Echos, the Google Homes of the world. Amazon largely dominates the category. They were the first player. Siri on your phone was kind of a novelty. Maybe you used it when you were driving. It doesn't work that well. It was very hard to use. And then all of a sudden, you got an Amazon Echo, and you could say, "Alexa, what's the weather?" "Alexa, set a timer." "Alexa, play Industry Focus." And all of those things worked. And I don't think many people are using them for higher-level functions. There's been a lot of studies showing they're not ordering product, they're not controlling their homes. But for those basic things, the phone paved the way. And now, how many Amazon devices do you have in your house? I know you have roommates.
Lewis: Well, you know, actually, Dan, I am not the average person here because I don't have any devices that listen to me -- aside from my phone, of course -- in my home. Partially for privacy reasons and partially because I haven't found that killer use case yet.
Kline: We have one in every room. I would say my son uses his largely for timers so he doesn't forget things in the toaster. I use mine for music or podcasts while I'm cooking dinner. And my wife doesn't know this yet, but she doesn't listen -- she's getting a clock with Alexa built in that can play music, because we had an Echo in our bedroom, but our cats would turn it on in the middle of the night and it would wake us up. So, we have one in every room in both of our homes.
Lewis: Well, I'll be sure not to send this episode to your wife so that I don't ruin the holiday surprise.
Kline: There's not a chance she would listen to it. [laughs]
Lewis: Yeah, it's kind of hard to overemphasize how big Amazon is in this space and how early they were compared to the rest of the market. They launched the Alexa-enabled device in March 2016, and then they were able to get a second-generation device out, the Echo Dot, before they had a competitor. They had such a big lead in this space and in the smart-home industry. And you look at the way that played out with market share, their market share didn't dip below 50% until two years after they launched that category, which is just incredible to me, Dan.
Kline: They also pursued a very smart strategy. When the first Echo was introduced, it was $199, but they offered it to Prime members -- I'm going to assume all of them, but I think they said selectively -- for $99. So, I had one on launch day. I'm going to guess a lot of Prime members did. And in my case, it was largely a music player for the year. It's now integrated with Apple Music. Back then, you either had to pay Amazon to subscribe, or, for the first year I had it, I just used the free Amazon Prime Music, which has a couple of million songs, and you can ask it to play your favorite artist and it'll have a selection of that usually. And it was just very useful. So, when the Dot came out, when other things came out, there was already a sort of rabid user base that was having a positive experience with this. I know there are some audiophiles who will complain about the speaker and all that, but for me, this replaced a very large stereo that took a lot of room in my house.
Lewis: Yeah, it's a really incredible strategy that they were able to walk through. I mentioned before that Apple makes margins on smartphones. That's generally their approach with hardware in general. They need to make something on their hardware sales. They also have their services revenue, which is an awesome kicker, but they are first and foremost a hardware company, so that's their approach. Amazon is not bound to that. It's pretty clear that they're not bound to that with how they've decided to operate in this market, because they've given stuff away or priced it so low that I can't imagine they're making very much money on it.
Kline: I don't think they're making any. During the holiday season, maybe still now, you could buy, I think it was five Echo Dots for $100. Their goal is owning the market space. They want their store set up in your living room, your kitchen. Even if you're not using it to order, you're still having positive interactions with Amazon. It's building their ecosystem. And I do think someday, it's going to be more practical to notice that you're out of paper towels and use your Echo or your Alexa assistant to order paper towels. It's just not something most people are doing. Amazon takes a "let's just get this stuff out there, and we'll figure out how to make money on it later" [approach]. And they own the category. Apple is essentially an also-ran in this category.
Lewis: Even Google is kind of an also-ran in this category, with products that aren't priced all that differently. I think at this point, if you look at the market share, Amazon has about twice the market share of their closest competitor, which is Google. They've been able to be very effective in this space because all of these hardware sales really fit into more of an ecosystem play for them. The data bears out that if people are Prime members, they spend more on Amazon than just a non-Prime member, and people that own Echo products or Alexa-enabled products generally spend more than Prime members. So, when you work within that system, and you don't need to make money on the hardware, it's a lot easier to get market share pretty quickly.
Kline: I think that's partly why Google has struggled. They don't have the full rest of the system. They have the Google Play Store and some music services and YouTube, but they don't have that easy, integrated [system] -- and Amazon had already built up some of its content, some of its links to podcasts, relationships with companies to do things like the Motley Fool skill on Alexa. So, Amazon just fit in better.
The real head-scratcher here is Apple. They were a market leader with voice assistants. Siri was first, and it seemed logical that you would get Siri in a different form for use in your home. I think it was integrated on Macs before they launched Apple Home, which is largely your HomePod, which has largely been a bust as far as I can tell.
Lewis: Yeah, I think you're right, Dan. It's something where I think a lot of people 10, 20 years from now are going to be looking back at the smart-home market with a lot of questions. That'll certainly be one of them.
I think, as we're looking back at the last 10 years, we also could not do that without talking about streaming TV. I feel like the entire binge culture that we live in, whether it's podcasts, or really Netflix, HBO, and all of the streaming content that's out there, did not exist. The idea of just being able to sit on your couch and watch an entire season of something in six hours, seven hours, was not there. And that is due in large part to a lot of the stuff that Netflix and some of the other players in this space have done over the last decade.
Kline: This is a category that sort of exploded. When it first launched, you had to have an Xbox or a PlayStation or a very expensive, relatively, player to access the limited content there was. And then you very quickly got Roku and Amazon coming along with what at first were somewhere between $40 and $60 streaming-TV sticks that made this not only cheap and accessible, but also very plug-and-play. The first time I got an Amazon Fire device -- I got the nicer one that was maybe $100 -- all I had to do was plug it in it. It knew who I was because I ordered it through my Amazon account. Everything was set up and ready to go. Setting up a Roku, or even -- and I'm not a Chromecast fan -- a Chromecast is very, very simple. So, it took something that was kind of techie and democratized it very quickly.
Lewis: Yeah, I remember so many times where I would have to hunt for an HDMI cord, try to find the cord, then realize I was on an Apple laptop and I didn't have the converter for the cord. It was a huge mess. So, all of these very, again, low-price products -- a Chromecast is like $35 -- came into the market and made it very easy for people to get all this content that they were getting on their laptop, thanks to streaming video becoming so large, now onto their TV.
This is a space where all of the major players in tech are. Amazon's here, Google's here, Apple's here. And, you have Sony and Microsoft, because they had their video game consoles. One of the things that makes this market so interesting to me, though, is despite that huge, deep-pocketed competition, a small player was able to come into this space and totally own it in a way that we really haven't seen that much of, Dan.
Kline: Part of it was, Apple, Google, Microsoft, they all have their biases, their enemies. Roku came into this and they were a pure platform for any content. So, it was easier for them to make deals. The other thing Roku was really able to do is, they went to the TV manufacturers and got their product integrated. Early smart TV was very clumsy. It had to update, it didn't always work. Maybe you can get to Netflix, but not to Hulu. Roku built into your TV is flawless, and it actually gives you some things that help you navigate if you don't have cable, it lets you integrate some of your channels, you can look at what you get via antenna if you have an antenna. And it's all very, very simple, in an interface that you don't have to be technical to understand. That's something that I don't think is entirely true with a Chromecast. It's mostly true with Amazon. But Roku is really in a good position to make every deal.
Lewis: I think Roku is a really great example of a company that was willing to disrupt itself. If you go back to the earlier part of this decade, the idea with Roku is, "We're going to make money on selling hardware." The story now with this company, with this stock, is its platform revenue. They are basically willing to forego making a ton of money on their products so that they can be in more living rooms, because they know that they're able to monetize people once they have them on their platform through a variety of different ways. It just highlights how brilliant they were in creating all these deals with smart TV manufacturers. I saw an estimate recently that they're in one in every three smart TVs sold in the United States. That's basically licensing for them. They don't need to do a ton to actually make that happen. The TV makers are the ones who are doing most of the manufacturing there.
Kline: Yeah, and they're going to be able to grow their revenue with things like games, and more pay-per-view is coming directly through those models. There's going to be types of content we haven't even thought of yet that will be on those platforms. Maybe very expensive, theatrical movie releases. Who knows what? But, they're in a solid position that's only going to get better.
Lewis: I saw an estimate that they have over 40 million active streaming media devices in the United States. Like you mentioned earlier, Dan, it comes down to them being platform agnostic and being brilliant with the partnering with traditional TV. I think this was also a market where being independent mattered. With the way that all of these companies had content ambitions and ecosystem ambitions, for them to be able to go out there and say, "We don't have a horse in this race, we're just trying to make sure that people can consume content no matter who they're getting that content from," was a very valuable bargaining chip.
Kline: I'll make my 2020 prediction, and that is that somebody buys Roku and it is no longer that freewheeling independent company.
Lewis: [laughs] So, that's your fast and loose prediction for 2020, Dan?
Kline: I just feel like it's one of the big prizes out there. They have a great business, and they might benefit from being owned by a bigger player. It's not like Sony's in the market for things, but they would be a very logical tie-up there. They would not be a stupid product for a T-Mobile to buy, even though T-Mobile is probably not in a financial place to buy anything else at the moment. They are a prize that makes more sense as part of a bigger company now that they already have these relationships.
Lewis: That'd be a really interesting full-circle kind of moment for Roku, because the company was famously developed and owned by Netflix originally, and management at Netflix realized that they were going to have a lot of trouble getting into the streaming players with their content if they owned something that was in the streaming player space. So they decided to spin it out and avoid all of that. The idea of them later being owned by somebody big, maybe someone who doesn't have content operations, is just kind of a funny one, Dan.
Kline: Yeah. I think it's not a great acquisition for people in the content space. And everybody is in the content space. But do you really believe that some of these content products aren't going to go away? I'm not sure the Apple investment in content is going to pay off quite the way they thought it would.
Lewis: I think you're probably right based on the critical reviews so far; I'm seeing lots of stuff coming out.
Kline: I have it for free and I've never watched anything.
Lewis: Yeah, there you go. I guess that that brings us to another thing that we should probably touch on as we're talking about streaming TV, and that is just the world of content that has developed over the last 10 years. The first Netflix original, House of Cards, did not come out until 2013. Hulu originals debuted in 2011. That set off a wild chain of events in my view, looking at all of these companies with a lot of money to spend deciding to throw it at creators and build up these really important tentpole franchises for their platforms.
Kline: It's changed the entire TV game. Not to age myself, but when I was a kid, and there were four networks and we didn't have cable, a hit show was watched by 40 million people. Now, you can be a hit show on cable at 2 million to 3 million people, and you are probably a hit show on Amazon Prime with 750,000 to 1 million. That's not going to fly for Lord of the Rings, but for the average show. Something like The Morning Show on Apple just needs to get positive attention. I don't think anybody's watching, but there were some award nominations for it. The value of originals has really changed. If you can lock in a niche audience, you can be a very successful long-running hit. That's a new development, which is really good for those of us who like TV.
Lewis: I think what's kind of funny about the whole thing, too, is while the likes of Netflix and Hulu -- and, of course, we can't talk originals without talking about HBO, because they are kind of the OG when it comes to originals -- while they decided all these things were important, they were also benefiting from making all of these huge IP libraries that other companies had available on streaming. The idea that you could watch The Office or something like that as part of your Netflix subscription. Not only did Netflix focusing on originals bring more content out there, but I think Netflix's success put all of these legacy companies in a position where they realized, "Our IP library is pretty darn valuable."
Kline: Yeah. I think we're reaching a weird inflection point on it. If you want to watch Friends and The Office and The Simpsons, I don't know, M*A*S*H, Taxi, Cheers, a couple of other historic shows, you're going to need like five different services, and it's going to cost you like $75 a month. I do think we're getting to a point where some of these are going to fail. I would argue that Disney+ might be the last hit, and when NBC launches Peacock, when Time Warner launches HBO Max, you might start to see some consumer pullback. You haven't seen people leaving any services because of new services, but people might move around more. "I'm going to watch Friends for four months here, and now I want to watch the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix." It's becoming a very, very big and confusing world.
Lewis: Yeah, I think it's cable just with more steps.
Kline: Yeah, it's cable that you can't traverse easily.
Lewis: Yeah.
Kline: With cable, you could flip around. Now I have to plug different things in. That's not all that simple.
Lewis: Alright, Dan, as we wrap up here, is there anything that you thought over the last 10 years, maybe in the moment, was going to really take off and just simply didn't find traction?
Kline: Yeah, virtual reality. And not from a high-end area. I thought that was going to become a default for gaming. If you were playing Madden, you'd have a headset on, and you'd be immersed in the world. I own an Oculus Go. In fact, I think I brought it to the office once. And it's fun, but you can't do it for more than 15 minutes without getting a headache. It's heavy. And the Oculus Go is the $200 version, and I was all excited, they put out a Star Wars game for Oculus and I was going to buy it. And yeah, you need the $500 Oculus to do that one. This hasn't become a consumer technology, and I don't think it's going to. I think it's going to be a fringe, theme park gaming, fun thing. Maybe it'll have some business applications eventually, but I don't think the next generation of consoles is going to be fully VR integrated.
Lewis: It's always been a price point issue for me. Some of the more involved things will be at $400 or so. There are some more accessible ones now around $200. But that's not exactly cheap for something you would buy without an immediate use case for. The content also hasn't quite been developed. It's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg type thing, Dan.
Kline: No, it has to be something that becomes a joystick-level of pricing, integrated into your video game systems. And I don't think the video game companies have been great with that. You had the Kinect with the Xbox, where you can move around, and that was an extra price, and it failed because of that. There's never been a steering wheel or a gun attachment or anything that's been a big, mainstream hit, because they haven't found a way to just bake it into the price. Maybe you'll see something like the Nintendo Switch, a true outlier, that makes VR gaming viable and affordable. But I thought that would have happened by now, and it absolutely hasn't.
Lewis: Listeners, we would love to know what you think might have flopped over the last 10 years. You can always tweet us @MFIndustryFocus, or write in, [email protected], with those thoughts.
Dan, thanks for hopping on today's show, man!
Kline: Thanks for having me!
Lewis: As we wrap up here, I'm going to just throw in a quick shameless plug. It's the holiday season. Dan and I have extolled the virtues of slowing down a bit on the consumerism this holiday season. I don't have a ton on my wish list this year, but one thing I would love is some ratings and reviews from our loyal listeners. I know it sounds a little crazy, but those things do help us reach more people on Apple podcasts, and it means more resources for the show. If you have a few seconds, folks, drop us a rating and review. It just takes a couple seconds and it's a huge help to us. And as a fun little twist for the holiday season, if you leave us a five-star review on iTunes, I'll read it on air, as long as it's family-friendly. Just go over to iTunes, give us a five-star review, some love for the show, maybe even some feedback or a joke, and I'll be sure to read it on-air.
Otherwise, that's going to do it for this episode of Industry Focus. If you want more of our stuff, subscribe on iTunes or catch videos from the podcast over on YouTube. As always, people on the program may own companies discussed on the show, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against stocks mentioned, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. Thanks to Dan Boyd for his work behind the glass today. For Dan Kline, I'm Dylan Lewis, thanks for listening and Fool on!
