Competing formats drive failure. Someone is going to get stuck with obsolete unsupported junk. Bernoulli, Zip, Jaz and the 2.88, for examples - none really became standard enough for the market, so PC manufacturers kept supplying the base 1.44 floppy drive. They lasted way past their useful capacity was blown by software bloat. With enough rewritable CD/DVD penetration coupled with USB keychain drives, manufacturers are finally starting to drop the floppy.

Remember the video CD? These were basic music CDs that had a video layer on the top - usually the MTV video of one of the tracks. This format didn't make it, but I still have a couple of them, but no player.