Google is set to re-brand their personalized pages under the ‘iGoogle’ name on Tuesday. Now if this were anyone but Google, Apple’s lawyers would likely be foaming at the mouth, but since as we all know Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple’s Board of Directors, you’d have to assume he ran it by Steve Jobs beforehand…

This is an interesting move on Google’s part for a couple reasons:

First, some in the company apparently wanted to use this name a few years ago, but were rejected by the fellas up top…now that ‘/ig’ suffix on the personalized homepages actually makes sense.

Second, you could assume one reason that it was rejected initially was that it seemed to be copying Apple, but why now is that all of a sudden okay? It doesn’t really seem like a Google move to so blatantly copy another naming scheme or else you’d think they would have thought up a better name for Google Docs & Spreadsheets, like say…Google Office.

Maybe this denotes an upcoming tighter partnership between Apple and Google? It would be good from a marketing perspective to combine two of the most powerful and hottest brands right now. Buy your iMac preloaded with iGoogle?

iDon’tGetIt.

More on this: PC World | BetaNews | Google Blogoscoped | Official Google Blog

[UPDATE]: the official iGoogle logo is up, pretty close to my mock-up…not surprisingly as all they did was add an ‘i’.