Access 2013 is one of the Pay as You Go carrots

From this article at ZdNet, the following quote says a lot about the future of Access in the Office suite.  "With an Office 365 Home Premium subscription, you get those programs (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote) and Outlook, Publisher, and Access.

My thoughts on this "Though I haven't read the fine print, this means that Microsoft need to keep including Access in the Premium line-up because the licence entitles users to free upgrades as long as they keep paying. So there you go dear readers, Microsoft have to keep Access going... As Excel and Word and Outlook work well in the cloud, its a good bet that Access will get the resources to fly to the cloud in the not to distant future. 

Garry Robinson - Access MVP from 2007 till now.