Waterford has a great history of the rise and fall of the Schwinn Paramount marque. Several times over the years their tooling, materials, methods, etc, grew outclassed, and Schwinn shut down Paramount production, cleaned house, and rebooted it once again as a top of the line racing frame. Their identity and reputation was, like most good bike brands, based on winning road races. Paramounts did that and it bought prestige to Schwinn from the top down. Paramount production basically shut down for good in 94'. 95' was the last year that (Indurain) a steel bike won the TDF. It was the end of an era. Modernising past steel was a step too far.
http://waterfordbikes.com/w/culture/paramount/It does sort of live on as Waterford though. Waterford is owned by Richard Schwinn. It's the factory where the last of the good Paramounts were built. It's still a strong brand. They make bikes you can race on (not very competitively). They build for Riv & they have Gunnar as well. I have one (a gunnar), about 16 years old. It's an excellent bike. I kind of think of it as a Schwinn. But it's not really cutting edge like Paramount always tried to be. Paramount several times changed their customer base to focus on nostalgic older moneyed riders (like Waterford now), when their bikes grew outdated, but that's not sustainable for a big company and Schwinn always shut it down and reintroduced it as a race bike.
tldr; Schwinn got bought out by an evil conglomerate
