Format USB flash drive

I was in need of a really Windows compatible USB flash drive.
To be sure the drive is compatible I wanted to format it using Windows.
But the drive was used before, so Windows didn't want to format it.
The easiest way was to wipe the drive on linux using

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1k count=2048

After this procedure Windows asks to format the drive when plugged in.