Then companies realized... Who cares what the user wants. I want them to see what I want them to see!
Seriously, I think that a customizable start page upon login to the portal would be a nice feature. This would be especially valuable for an Intranet site.
Liferay is a Java portal that does this very well. However this seems to be all it really does well. I think it should be a feature, not the main draw of the portal. It really needs to be part of the core though.