MacRumors.com

Bob Hearn maintains an interesting site detailing "A Brief History of Clarisworks". In it, he details the origins of Clarisworks and his involvement, back to a small company called StyleWare in the mid 1980's.

Overall, an interesting history to read, but one of the most interesting components relate to the original development team's departure around the time of ClarisWorks 5.0's development. A few of the ClarisWorks developers who left at this time (Scott Holdaway, Scott Lindsey, Carl Grice, Bruce Hammond and Tom Hoke) left to found Gobe software.

After Be's failure, and the subsequent demise of Gobe, it appears Apple did have interest in acquiring Gobe:

Apple did not in the end acquire Gobe as such, but three of its founders, Scott Holdaway, Scott Lindsey, and Carl Grice, did rejoin Apple as employees when Gobe failed. They won't tell me what they are up to (even off the record!), but whatever it is, it does not involve the Gobe Productive codebase. Nor, I am reasonably sure, does it involve the ClarisWorks / AppleWorks codebase.

Bob Hearn returned to graduate school to study Artificial Intelligence.