Sucks for someone to lose their business , but what can ya do ?   

Clay.  A business needs to essentially be clay and be able to mold to the market and economy.  If they did become complacent and rode their earlier success for many years, they really have nobody to blame but themselves.  I don't mean that in a mean way, but from the sounds of it they allowed themselves to become stale and stagnant.  They were obviously good at product development and machining, so they could have easily re-written themselves as such and lent themselves to other markets.  If they wanted to stay afloat that is