Technology

Microsoft last week followed Google's lead, telling customers that it was suspending releases of its Edge browser.

Citing "current global circumstances" rather than outright naming the COVID-19 pandemic and its upturning of, well, virtually everything, Microsoft said it would not upgrade the current Edge 80 to the next version, Edge 81.

"As the situation evolves," Microsoft said, it will inform customers of other changes, and presumably when it will resume Edge refreshes, through the Microsoft Edge Dev account on Twitter.

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Email is everywhere, and it has been around seemingly forever. But is it really the most effective way for groups of people to collaborate on work and advance business objectives? Several newish team messaging products, most notably Slack, wager that the answer is indeed no. Slack and its rivals try to remove threaded email conversations as a common platform of communication in organizations and replace it with instant message-like short bursts organized into channels based on the context or subject of the conversation.

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April Underwood, who until early last year was Slackchief product officer, has joined Obvious Ventures as a venture partner, she announced on Twitter today.

Underwood said that as part of the firmteam, she will &invest in great companies seeking to solve the big problems facing humanity: our climate, human health and wellness, and how we work.& Of Obviousfocus on &backing company with world positive impact,& she said its mission &couldn&t possibly feel more needed than it does in this particular moment.&

For Underwood, the role is one of several that she is currently juggling. She founded a startup advisory outfit called Wise Owl last year. She is also a cofounder of #Angels, an organization that focuses on investing in female founders and to which Underwood remains very committed, she said today, tweeting that her focus on &getting more women on the cap tables of successful startups will continue unabated.&

Underwood is now among a growing number of #Angels cofounders — powerful women at Twitter who introduced the initiative in 2015 — to be investing on pretty much a full-time basis.

In addition to Underwood, who spent nearly five years as a director of product at Twitter before joining Slack, #Angels was founded by Jana Messerschmidt, who is now a partner with Lightspeed Venture Partners; Jessica Verrilli, who is now a general partner with GV; and Katie Stanton Jacobs, who recently closed her own first venture fund with $25 million in capital commitments under the brand Moxie Ventures.

Another #Angels founder Vijaya Gadde, was and remains the General Counsel at Twitter. Meanwhile, Chloe Sladden, a former VP of Media at Twitter, last year cofounded a seed-stage startup making collaborative parenting tools called Honeycomb Labs.

Underwood, who also sits on the board of Zillow, was in charge of much of Slackstrategy and product decisions during her nearly four years with the company.

Underwood is now one of three venture partners who are working with Obvious Ventures .

The others include serial entrepreneur, investor and advisor Julie Hanna, and Di-Ann Eisnor, who was previously the Director of Urban Systems at GoogleArea 120.

Obvious Ventures — cofounded very notably by Twitter cofounder Ev Williams — closed its third fund with roughly $270 million in capital commitments earlier this year.

It1998, and there are still plenty of old PCs in use at the newspaper company where this new-to-IT pilot fish works.

&Back then, humorous emails about clueless users and IT woes were still pretty new,& says fish. &I read one claiming a user had put a CD-ROM in a floppy-disk drive. I discounted it as a silly claim. I couldn&t believe you could actually do it.

But barely three weeks later, fish walks into the shop and is greeted by a co-worker who says, &Hey, guess what you can put in a 5-1/4-inch drive?&

&I look at the computer heworking on and, sure enough, heusing pliers to try to extract a CD-ROM from a floppy drive.&

Sharkynot surprised at anything anyone puts anywhere.So put your true tale of IT life in my inbox at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.

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Compass, the real-estate brokerage startup backed by roughly $1.6 billion in venture funding, has laid off 15% of its staff as a result of the shifting economic fortunes created by the global response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, according to an internal email seen by TechCrunch.

Citing economic fallout that has seen stock markets plummet 30 percent in just 22 days, Compass chief executive Robert Reffkin wrote that the company has seen an over 60 percent decline in real estate showings and is modeling a six-month decline in revenue of 50 percent.

&We aren&t just facing an economic recession, we are facing an economic standstill,& Reffkin wrote. As the countryunemployment rate soars to a projected 10 percent, Reffkin wrote that the company had no choice but to cut its workforce.

The 15 percent reduction in staffing is being accompanied by an 80% reduction in its concierge business for the moment. As part of the reductions in corporate spending, Reffkin cut his own salary to nothing and reduced the entire executive teamsalary by 25 percent.

For the employees that are laid off, the company said it would provide an &enhanced severance and COBRA health insurance& along with letting employees hang on to their company laptops and providing tools, training, and networking help so that they can try to get a new job.

The news from Compass is just one indicator of a potential reckoning coming for the booming property tech investment category.

Earlier today, TechCrunch reported that Zillow was suspending its homebuying activities as a result of the new economic reality.

Zillow said it decided to halt its offers to sellers after several states, including California, Illinois, Louisiana, Ohio, New York and Nevada, implemented emergency orders requiring people to stay home and stopping all non-essential business activities, including some real estate-related activities.

Opendoor and Redfin made similar decisions to pause homebuying. Meanwhile other real estate companies are also laying off staff. The co-working startup Convene laid off staff as well, citing current market conditions.

Reffkin is hopeful that the economy will turn around and predicted that the economy could recover in the next 100 days, ending his email saying that he looks forward to a return to normalcy for Compass and the broader market.

&I feel hopeful that Chinaapparent success at reducing the spread of the Coronavirus and restarting their enormous economy may provide a blueprint for our future, as well,& Reffkin wrote. &And I feel hopeful because of the ways I see people throughout our company and throughout our society stepping up during this challenging time.&

To date, Compass has raised $1.6 billion in financing from investors including the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity, Wellington Management, Softbank Vision Fund, and the Qatar Investment Authority, according to Crunchbase.