Adobe Stops FreeHand Development: Part II

Today, we are publishing details regarding recent Adobe Live Events which took place recently in Paris and in London, it brings additional support to our original news related to Adobe stopping further development of FreeHand.
First a report from one of our English readers (thanks James):

I also went along to the Adobe event, in London, last week
My main reason for attending any Adobe event is to try and find out what is happening . . .
I managed to speak to a guy who was demonstrating some flash animations.
His early background was initially with GoLive, from the CyberStudio days
When I asked about Freehand, he said the intention was to port all or most of the main attributes of Freehand to Illustrator and/or Fireworks and during this period Adobe would maintain the app as a standalone. I believe this is called assets striping. This could take up to three years or cycles to achieve. Yes, he knows Freehand has a 75 per cent market share in Germany

Unfortunately for Adobe, one of our team member was also at the Adobe Live Event in Paris, and hereafter are some parts of his report/comments following Robert Raiola presentation:

Freehand market share in France is probably below 15%, the rest being own by Illustrator, so for the French market it does not really matter to announce the end of Freehand development. This is of course another story for, the Germany located, Adobe PR Manager Alexander Hopstein. Indeed, Freehand market share is close to 75% in Germany and more than 50% in UK and Italy, so for its business and external communication, Adobe can not announce officially the end of Freehand development. Even though it is the truth, and the current strategy.
The official announcement will come when Illustrator CS3 will be released, it will natively manage/support Freehand files. At that time, Adobe will for sure makes special offers to Freehand user to migrate to Illustrator.
GoLive future is not dark yet, but definitely not bright at all, Robert Raiola was mentioning that it will remain in the catalog for specific users, even though those niche markets have to be clearly defined and identified...

I think that we have now a better view of Adobe strategy for the coming months. In addition, Adobe have also to port most of its applications to Universal Binaries. So if the strategy is understandable, Adobe should try to better communicate with its customers, instead of hiding information.