When I was a kid I remember reading and dreaming about all these alternative storage formats: MO, flopticals, Zip drive, LS-120, etc. The idea of a little disk with the capacity of a hundred floppies was amazing, it's a pity that none could replace them.
Zip drives were fairly expensive so weren't really a solution for archival. CDR and their immutability were more interesting for archival. Zip drives weren't useful for sharing data as they weren't OEM deivces so you wouldn't expect anyone to have the drive and it soon became easier to email files. So basically Zip drives were only useful as an extension of your own hard drive or to share files between 2 computers you owned that were equipped with a zip drive (say home and office). This has been gradually frowned upon by companies so this was only really a thing for people working independently. Additionally in the later years while the size of the usb flash drive could increase constantly, the zip drives had to evolve in parallel with the medias. An early adopter who had to upgrade from zip100 to zip250 then zip750 would have had 3 drives to purchase, even more so because of the click of death while a newer usb2.0 flash drive would work on an old computer with usb1.0 or 1.1 port.