Are your sites written in C++ and being attacked by China and Russia? Do they have plug-ins for several hundred apps, many of which work with ever changing external websites? Do your sites integrate with critical email and advertising accounts? I would not be surprised to learn they were burning $1M a year on iGoogle.

Re. random downvoting, it happens on tablets. Chill, somebody else will be along shortly to vote the comment up out of the gray.

Attacks: I would guess that is dealt with on a netwok level for all of Google, not individually per app.

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.

It is client side in the www.google.com domain. Meaning it can potentially attack other services in that domain like, oh, most other Google services. You'd want more than just a lone intern watching over it in his spare time.