That's kind of the point of my comment - software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers etc etc. They were stuck with 1.44MB becaus

That's kind of the point of my comment - software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers etc etc. They were stuck with 1.44MB because that was the only thing guaranteed to work. There was a human management problem around agreeing on a specification; drive manufacturers and software companies simply had conflicting incentives, so the market was a mess. In retrospect I think the only reason Zip was able to become the undisputed market leader in high-capacity disks is that CD-ROM fully took over commercial software distribution.