"Colt is on the bottom because they made no effort to stay on top for 50 years."
Bingo.
I've posted about this a number of times in the past.
Essentially, after World War II, Colt largely ABANDONED the civilian market.
They surrendered the strong share of the civilian/police revolver market they once had to Smith & Wesson by refusing to innvoate and market.
Smith repeatedly caught them flat footed with new features and, more importantly, new cartridges for both revolvers AND semi-autos.
Colt never took meaningful steps towards the development of a semi-automatic handgun.
In the 1960s, with the exception of the 1911 and a few revolvers, Colt converted most of their production over to the AR series of rifles for the military. The civilian market was a small by product of that, and one that they actually half-heartedly served.
When the Wonder9 craze hit, though, that's when Colt's decisions came back to haunt them. In spades.
Colt had no viable offerings in the semi-auto handgun market, and sales of their few revolver lines and the 1911s came virtually to a standstill because it's not what people were interested in at that time.
To add insult to injury Colt, which had considered the AR rifle contract to be theirs forever, was beaten out by FN on a huge procurement.
Those two factors there started Colt's nearly 10 year flirtation with bankruptcy and receivership.
Even when Colt tried to introduce double action guns, they were pretty much disasters. The Double Eagle was only moderately well received, but when the problems with it became known, its sales slowed to a trickle.
The Colt AA2000 was a freaking disaster.
After the Wonder9 fiasco settled out, and the magazine capacity ban was adopted, Colt's products started picking up again.
But, they chose to get rid of their revolver lines just as revolvers were making a come back.
They introduced the .22 Cadet, and immediately were sued by I believe Coonan for trademark violation. As an aside, though, that gun should have made it. It was a SWEET .22 semi-auto, but it couldn't compete with the already established Ruger and Browning.
Yeah. Colt's last 50 years have been a legacy of poor choices and poor management, but that doesn't negate the fact that it's still the same Colt, in the same factory, with the same lineage, and the same workforce, as it was when the company started.
