While Microsoft Works has been discontinued, you should still be able to run it in modern Windows (which is what backwards compatibility is about - Office is a totally different product, after all).
(1) The post I was responding to was about Microsoft Office 2019 being able to open documents created by older versions, not about Microsoft Office 97 being able to run on modern Windows.
(2) Microsoft Works (at least the version we had a license to) definitely does not run on modern Windows. My dad's business is forced to keep a Windows XP VM alive, in order to keep running Works Database, because as I mentioned, there's still not a migration path to anything for it.
