We asked some questions of Christopher Griffin, who has been a part of the Strategic & Emerging Business Team at Microsoft, and works with high-potential startups, the venture investment community, and Microsoft product groups in Redmond. His challenge is to align these three groups by actively championing specific companies, helping facilitate funding events when/where it makes sense, and/or securing partnerships/acquisitions in areas that matter to Microsoft.

Are startups these days focused on solving enterprise issues, such as collaboration, or are they too enamored with consumer-facing applications? Is this perhaps a missed opportunity for many people?

Based on what I’m seeing, many startups over the last year are increasingly re-focusing toward the enterprise, and they are bringing a lot of that consumer-minded UX goodness along with them. Whether it’s Yammer taking a Twitter-like communication technology into the enterprise, or Gist trying to integrate high-grade search relevancy and pattern analysis into the Outlook experience, a lot of startups are going after enterprise dollars. I think this is a natural swing away from pure consumer plays (outside of gaming)—the fast rise of a few sites like Facebook brought a lot of entrepreneurs to that dance a couple of years ago, but once they all got there and built out sites and applications, the reality of ad-driven social monetization forced many to rethink that opportunity. I did a very small business development deal with Facebook when it had 18M users, and that was around spring of 2007. So from about that time until, say, fall of 2008, I felt that there was a lot of activity on the consumer/social web side of things. Since around fall of 2008 (when Yammer won the TC50), everyone has been paying more attention to the enterprise as a potential channel. But, because these are startups, they typically—by necessity—have to focus on solving only one part of a larger problem, which you guys have broadly addressed, for example, in your white paper on Social Business Design. Even Yammer, for example, was criticized pretty soundly by some press for being a lark. But here they are a year later, announcing partnership activities with Microsoft and having over 50,000 companies using the service.

In your opinion, why don’t Facebook and Twitter embrace the enterprise more? It’s probably good news for SharePoint that they don’t, but, who are the new breeds of startups focused on this?

SharePoint, as you probably know, has had huge customer traction to date: millions and millions of users are really starting to explore SharePoint as a true platform for increased collaboration. As you also know, the bar for improvement, for various reasons, is often pretty low at a lot of companies, so even a unified, shared view of documents and, say, marketing materials, can really have an immediate, positive impact. SharePoint has big plans for really enabling social applications within the enterprise, bringing a lot of enterprise-ready skills and experience to bear on what today is still treated as a kind of one-off issue, e.g. employees communicating business information via Facebook. There is still a ton of business opportunity in this space, and we obviously hope to be a part of that.

As for startups, Yammer is a great example: at this year’s TC50 they announced an Outlook plug-in and a Windows Mobile version of its application, and you can be sure that Twitter is thinking about its enterprise approach. Those are two companies with similar characteristics, building on what clearly started (with Twitter) as a social, consumer concept focused on true end users.

But there are also a bunch of startups diving head-long into the enterprise space at what I’d call “messier” levels. Linxster offers services that enable data exchange, as a service, with no specialized coding, between enterprise .NET applications and Internet-focused apps. Gnip offers a radically simplified model for data integration across a host of social media services. Mashery offers enterprise customers the ability to offload all the “plumbing” around their own API packaging, so that partners, developers, and end users can access those data feeds easily. All three deliver their solutions as a service.

Any personal views or successes on what Microsoft does internally to get in tune with constituents?

The group of which I am a part has the advantage of being small, organizationally flat, and heavily focused externally, so we tend to share information probably more than your typical “enterprise” team. We use Office Communicator heavily—both its instant message capabilities as well as its internet telephony component. Nearly all of my phone calls are now made via a headset plugged into a USB port on my laptop, which integrates “presence” so that others can know, with some detail, where I am and what I’m doing. Several team members are heavy Xobni users, letting that application help them better understand and build on their own communication patterns—which, let’s face it, have a huge social component—between colleagues. There is a Yammer group as well. One of the most basic, but incredibly useful, tools, to be honest, is the way Microsoft’s entire organization chart is integrated into our online global address book. In a few clicks, it lets me visualize, for example, how two people from two different teams I’m working with are related. And that holistic view of an organization as broad as Microsoft has enormous value to me personally, because so much of my role is about influence, rather than command.