Could we just pick one?

What if we had only one major desktop environment?

• Hasn't happened in last 4 years; not looking likely anytime soon.
• WINE, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and many Qt/GTK+ applications would still exist.
• People would not bother to document and specify many things that should be documented and specified.
• We would lose a lot of smart developers.
• All our eggs in one basket, with no motivating competition.