VBA will continue to be supported in next generation office

From several discussions I recently had with Enterprise Architects from various big enterprises over here in the Belux region, it clearly appears that VBA plays an important (too important?) role in the "End User Computing" area in those enterprises. Hence, some concerns might have raised in those enterprises due to the recent announcements that Microsoft will close its VBA licensing program (closed)  that the new Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 will debut without VBA support.  

Some rumors even started to spread that VBA support would "soon" be stopped by MS but in recent posts of the Visual Studio team blog  (post)  and the Excel team blog it is explicitly stated that VBA will continue to be supported in the next generation of Office.

Some extracts out of those posts:

"The report that the next generation of Office will not contain VBA is untrue -- the next generation of the Microsoft Office system will definitely contain all of the functionality that developers and power users expect from VBA"

"While it’s true that VBA isn't supported in the latest version of Office for the Mac...we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows,"

"We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA from future versions of Excel."

So, while the current preferred way to add functionality to office is obviously .NET (via Visual Tools for Office, VSTO), we still will continue to support the zillions lines of VBA code  that are lying around in enterprises around the globe!