The goal of any publicly owned business is to Increase Shareholder Value.
Creating more affordable upper-mid-range machines and spending a lot of development time on AppleWorks would likely not support that goal as well as using those resources on other projects.
AppleWorks is probably headed for a shallow grave somewhere in the Meadowlands near Jimy Hoffa, for reasons both financial and diplomatic. It really is in Apple's best interests to keep up to date versions of Microsoft Office available for the Mac. For people who feel strongly about MS products there's always OpenOffice, leaving AW a product without a good argument for existing (In my opinion).
Creating more affordable upper-mid-range machines and spending a lot of development time on AppleWorks would likely not support that goal as well as using those resources on other projects.
AppleWorks is probably headed for a shallow grave somewhere in the Meadowlands near Jimy Hoffa, for reasons both financial and diplomatic. It really is in Apple's best interests to keep up to date versions of Microsoft Office available for the Mac. For people who feel strongly about MS products there's always OpenOffice, leaving AW a product without a good argument for existing (In my opinion).