A reverse analogy of what happened to Marshall is what happened to cellular phones. Remember when there were limited choices for mobiles and people would keep their doohickey that could play Snake for multiple years?
The manufacturers conspired and decided that planned obsolescence was a better strategy. If you could get people to buy a phone every year or two instead of holding on to it for multiple years, there is more money to be made. That's why it's never top of the line chips or specs. They always give us tech that's a generation or two old and probably kept out of the public eye.
And that also brought about the rise of deceptive tactics like Apple suddenly claiming that their OS updates necessitated that the battery life of older models would be shortened. And when it was found out, did the anti-competition or monopoly bodies do anything? Palms must have been greased all the way up political parties *worldwide* to ensure that Apple was not forced to face a hefty lawsuit for cheating millions of people who bought their phones.
They do this in other manufacturing industries as well. Just look at how long a refrigerator will keep running these days, whereas the old ones would last for a decade or two and could be easily serviced.
In comparison, look at all the Marshalls from the 60s or at least 70s and 80s floating around. Many of them are still in service, or could be easily repaired and restored to give them several more decades of life. But while this meant that the company had a famous name for reliability and good tone, it also meant that they became victims of their own manufacturing strategy, with amp sales shrinking over the years. It's unsustainable.
Sure, you can blame the family for selling the brand and amp-making business, but if you just look at how guitar technology is evolving - we even have discussions on Rig-Talk about new modellers and guys like @DanTravis62 selling their amps and going completely digital - you'd realise that they were staring down the barrel of a gun where even the few amp models they were making would see further shrinkage going ahead.
I mean, Jim Marshall was legendary in the amp-making business. It's plausible that his children did not have the same skills or mindset to keep a business like that going. So rather than run the business into the ground, it's great that the Marshall legacy lives on for a little while longer, even if it is no longer the same company.
We're going to see lots of changes in the amp industry things continue to evolve. How many of you know a good amp tech that's local? The numbers are definitely shrinking. I don't even have one anywhere near me. That means the amps I own may become unusable in the not to distant future, and I will have no way of getting them up and running. That's my biggest worry.
