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.

>software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers

Oh they could and they did in Japan when those computers were sold. PC-88 is not IBM PC compatible.

https://necretro.org/PC-88_VA3