My homepage on every browser I use is set to iGoogle. Thus whenever I open a browser, I get a quick overview of news, weather, time & date, my GMail inbox, and the stock quotes relevant to me. Now Google is telling me that they will stop that service in November of next year. I think that is the most recent in a string of similar bad decisions.

Google, while having a near-monopoly in search engines, is obviously struggling to compete with Facebook in the field of social spaces, and with Apple in mobile platforms and services. In my opinion that leads to Google trying too hard to come up with the next big thing; in the process they are coming up with lots of different applications, only to abandon them after a few years. Google Buzz is already dead, Google Wave was stillborn, and now they are closing iGoogle.

I think that strategy is flawed, because it only leads to me worrying about all the other Google applications I'm using. What if Google shuts down Blogger, or GMail, or Google+? And if people think that Google is unable or unwilling to make platforms and applications that stick, they will prefer the competitors' products. If you have to choose between Google+ and Facebook, you might easily choose the social networking service that is more likely to still be there tomorrow, and that isn't the Google one.