One way to look at all these shutdowns is that Google is on a hiring spree - for every one of these zombie projects they kill they get a bunch of engineers who are already vetted by Google's HR and are familiar with Google's dev processes.
Just leave it up for christs sake. I wonder if this isn't about forcing people to other services.
Take the developers and let it keep going. No new commits, it works!
This is not just speculation, either. The project I worked on at Google had to deal with such zombie products all the time, and they were a HUGE drain on productivity for us.
The whole thing about "the one which is deprecated and the one which isn't ready yet" is rooted in reality.
It should theoretically be possible to make iGoogle a 100% client-side one-page app and require zero maintenance, or additional resources.
I have sites that run for years without me editing a single line of code or any other sort of maintainance. Backups run automatically, so do regular clean-ups of the database and certain directories.
What sort of maintainance would you say a largely client-side application like iGoogle does require?
Edit: anybody care to explain the random downvoting?
Re. random downvoting, it happens on tablets. Chill, somebody else will be along shortly to vote the comment up out of the gray.
Plugins: Just drop the external sources that change their APIs.
Accounts: Accounts are managed by Google Accounts, not by individual apps.
iGoogle is mainly a client-side script that displays small amounts of data. Still think there is not much "maintaining" to do.
1 developer, 75% time. That's it. If they are north of 2 developers they are doing something very wrong.