CDs where not cheap either, mind you. Yet CDs replaced cassettes rather quickly.

They were like a 3-4 year fad while also CD burners were coming online so they did not really provide a significant storage medium because if you wanted large sizes, you typically just needed readonly CDs.

Needing large and Read-Write was the niche than CD-R and CD-RW did much better. Along with CDs in general, they just didn't do much more than span a small temporal gap in value proposition.

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