There’s a peculiar trend in technology where the media looks for a “killer” of the big, successful companies. When Slack came along, it was hailed as the “email killer” by notable outlets such as Time and The Verge, though not long after, people questioned whether you were actually able to kill email. As the cycle continued, Slack became big enough to warrant its own spate of would-be killers, in the form of Atlassian’s Stride and, curiously enough, Google’s Hangouts bot. Despite the incredible revenue growth of the Office platform, including Microsoft Word, Salesforce apparently acquired the means to kill it. It’s also important to remember that Google Docs is approaching nine years from when it was promised to kill the Office Suite.

The most obvious reason this happens is the media cycle is endearing. We watch David slay (or at least bruise) Goliath, only then to become the new Goliath that a new David will stand up to. America, in particular, loves an underdog story, and it’s an endearing message and banner to fight under to be destroying the status quo and building a completely new world.

As I’ve suggested, however, that’s not quite the reality we’re facing. Slack hasn’t killed HipChat or email, Google Docs hasn’t killed the Office Suite and only Netflix looks to have actually done significant damage to the status quo. Those companies that are truly succeeding aren’t simply destroying and replacing the contents of the industry they’re growing in, but adding efficiency and enhancing them.

If It’s Not Broken, Make It Better

If you compare the last decade of software and hardware development, you could see companies like Apple, Salesforce, Uber and Box as the great destroyers. Their success certainly destroyed the comfortable profit centers of their former competitors, but a great deal of it focused on taking existing workflows and modernizing them.

Salesforce ejected the comfortable hold that Lotus Notes (now known as IBM Notes) held over much of the sales community by providing a slicker, more human interface that synced with far better communication platforms from Microsoft and Google. It solved the core pain points that actual salespeople faced, removing barriers to logging conversations and calls and speeding up the core processes that every level of the company faced. It didn’t change the communication channels themselves (phone and email); it amplified the ability to do business across them and gave people actionable insights into their actual business. Lotus Notes was an aged, positively prehistoric platform — and a software-first, device-agnostic platform like Salesforce rightfully outdid it.

Another classic assumption is that the advent of a new, impressive technology will entirely rearrange the fabric of how we work. In 2015, messaging was set to kill email, according to Scientific American, while Wired assumed that Facebook Messenger would be the perpetrator. Video conferencing is set to kill email, and chat apps will allegedly kill the browser. The truth is, each of these is a fundamental use of an object to complete a task — the tool we use to complete said task may change, but I encourage you to focus on the core task itself.

Though The Wall Street Journal believes that we are approaching the end of typing thanks to video and voice, there is a vast assumption in that claim about how people wish to communicate. Short messages are excellent for verifying information piece by piece, whereas a short call can help deal with a host of urgent issues quickly and effectively, with no room for the misinterpretation that happens over text. A video chat adds a personal, immediate communicative layer — an emotive context that is missing from text and only somewhat present over the phone. An in-person conversation has a physical element — the most personal of communication.