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That's my point. You've prefaced most of your post with 'I'.
We on this forum are generally an exception when you think about it. We're knowledgeable about the market and see how consolidation would work. Lots of people at the end of the day, isn't the complete market.
Road bikes still dominate cycling by a long shot, and the groupsets on that are still road based. OTP bikes still come with mostly road components. Making a one groupset to rule them all would just push everyone to just say 'errr, let's just put this on everything' and bam, why buy anything else?
Think of it the same way as Apple does things.
Do I agree with you on a cross compatibility and how fucking convenient it would be? Hell yes. Does Shimano, I don't think so.
Chak-
Road bikes still dominate cycling by a long shot
Aren’t far more otp mtbs and hybrids sold?
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i don't see how it would hurt, they'd just sell more.
people still would care about having close spacing, and many people wouldn't want a clutch or a long cage, so they'd use road ss rds, and for q-factor, chainline, and ring size reasons you'd still have many different cranks and so on. there would just be some bikes that come oem with sram 1x that would instead have shimano 2x, and they'd have the enthusiasts like ourselves too.
apple is fucking annoying for the same reason of course. but there i think it actually makes sense. the more they lock things up and make them user-friendly the harder they are to fuck up and the better time people have. making road/mtb di2 interoperable would not really cause any problems in that sense.
one sense in which the apple analogy is completely opposite though is that they have good support for a bunch of unix tools (i.e., via homebrew and the clt) which has effectively stolen a bunch of developers that would otherwise probably be linux users. doing that didn't really hurt their main market either. i'm just saying shimano should do the same.
miro_o
zmjones_
because they would sell more? they'd eat into sram's 1x adventure market for sure. lots of people out there want huge range doubles (with near mtb low gears) and big top end too, like 46/11 or 50/11. i can't see any possible business reason to make your shit less versatile when it doesn't cost you anything.
i also don't see it as fragmenting at all, rather the opposite. i'd almost sell my xc bike because i like combining xc/cx type rides with paved riding much more than either on its own.