That is one way of thinking about the world. Another way is to consider all software as support software. The machines are supposed to be there to help us. The

That is one way of thinking about the world. Another way is to consider all software as support software. The machines are supposed to be there to help us. There are countless players offering transactional support systems, and just like every other Big Software Vertical, the industry is still re-aligning around "Web 2.0". Desk's primary market distinction is that Salesforce owns them. (That's a huge selling point in the enterprise, but not necessarily interesting to the HN crowd.) The grandparent post is describing a workflow for more conversational customer interactions. The industry term-of-art for this is something like multi-channel support, but Slack's Big Philosophy is to just be more playful. The "proper software" to use is the software that gets stuff done. If you get more than two people defining what "proper support software" is, you end up with something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMC_Remedy_Action_Request_System#Applications_using_Action_Request_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMC_Remedy_Action_Request_Syst... People just have different workflows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯