It's not really about marketing (well OK, maybe a little bit.) Hard disk capacity used base 10 units once the average disk size got a little too big for conveniently using base 2 units, as they are a linear/serial storage medium which means a disk platter's capacity can be any number of bytes you like.
At the read/write head, hard drives are basically serial, but (for a long time) from the outside, they are random access devices addressed by sector. The capacity is actually any number of sectors you like. Sectors have a power-of-two size, as a natural consequence of the fact they are buffered in RAM. This may explain 1MB = 1,024,000 bytes being used for a while; this is the definition applicable to a "1.44MB" floppy disk.
Binary prefixes are a natural convention for memory chip sizes: they simplify expressing exact values because the chips have both a power-of-two addresses (a number of address lines) and a power-of-two data lines. Decimal prefixes are a natural convention for line rates: they simplify expressing exact values when, as is typical, a factor in the rate is a clock frequency defined with a decimal prefix.
The rationale for a convention is less clear-cut and often varies in other cases, such as hard drive sizes. This, I assume, led to kibibyte etc to disambiguate.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
