Can anyone shed some light on this?

...as posted on AW Forum (not my post):

"My e80 hasn't yet arrived but during my search i spoke with a shopowner who has stopped stocking roland because "they've closed their research & developement department?"..he then tried 2 sell me a korg pa1xpro..nice but not quite..5 minutes playing the e80 and i was hooked.."

"yes it puzzled me..when i questioned him further he said they no longer have a R & D department so their future keyboards & support will be just variations on the E-series models..however as i said he was trying to sell me a korg pa x1pro at the time so maybe it was part of his pitch..also he said he's stopped stocking rolands so you never know the politics of such a thing.."

I (Taike here) was told by a salesperson that the G-series will be discontinued and the E-series will see further development. But "only variations" on the E-models? No idea what this is all about.

Taike

This is absolutely not true.
Some friends of mine work at Roland Europe R&D and I know that all is going on regularly.

It seems to be a kind of dirty trick to sell other than Roland products.

in a way, that reminds me of the type of message i receive sometimes in my yahoo email account: "yahoo has reached it's maximum capacity, so they will no more aloud new accounts...", or "yahoo wants to ask money for their email account..." etc. etc. etc.