Ordinary Gweilo

I am utterly baffled by this announcement from Google:

On November 1, 2013, iGoogle will be retired. We originally launched iGoogle in 2005 before anyone could fully imagine the ways that today’s web and mobile apps would put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips. With modern apps that run on platforms like Chrome and Android, the need for iGoogle has eroded over time, so we’ll be winding it down. Users will have 16 months to adjust or export their data.

Why?  I am not aware of anything that will present news and GMail in a single web page and run in all browsers.  Yes, there are plenty of other content aggregators around (and Netvibes seems to be the best of the bunch), but they can’t display all the Google services (such as GMail).

There may be some very good services available if you use Google Chrome as your browser, but many companies only allow Internet Explorer.     

And there seem to be plenty of others who feel the same way.