These standards, archaic as they may be, also allow you to export your emails should you want to. I pay for my wife's Yahoo email account, such that GMail can use POP3 to connect to it and retrieve the emails that she gets on that account. Not to mention that email clients work best if native. iOS users didn't have to wait for Google to release a half-baked client for them.
As an alternative, of course, we can do better than POP3 or IMAP. Sure, lets burn them, but name an alternative first and it has to be a standard supported by Google, no?
I can't believe that you think this. You're basically arguing for the sake of arguing.
Btw, you're mentioning "web interfaces". How would you have liked it if everybody had their own browser-like app, communicating through their own http-like protocol, speaking their own language for hyper-linked documents?
As an alternative, of course, we can do better than POP3 or IMAP. Sure, lets burn them, but name an alternative first and it has to be a standard supported by Google, no?
I can't believe that you think this. You're basically arguing for the sake of arguing.
Btw, you're mentioning "web interfaces". How would you have liked it if everybody had their own browser-like app, communicating through their own http-like protocol, speaking their own language for hyper-linked documents?