In an interesting week in the yellow sphere (more on that on Monday) Chris Toohey  mentions his "horror" at .NET development in a local college and how this is affecting the Lotus developers of tomorrow. Not much of a surprise really given the discounts education facilities get from MS.

While I really don't have anything useful to add (I didn't use Notes at college either), I do have an interesting "experiment" that is knocking around in my head.

See, at STS we try to give back. We do this in several different ways. For instance we give a percentage of revenue to charity (employees get to chose the charity), we try to place an intern or two during the summer from a specific college or two.

Well this year the internship starts this coming Monday. I won't mention gender or college unless I get permission from them but I am thinking about allowing them to guest blog here on their impressions of the Lotus products and how they fit into their experiences.

When we interviewed said perspective intern they had never heard of Lotus, or Notes, or Domino, etc, etc so this will be a pretty good (and honest) opinion of the product set by the potential TNG. They are a computer science major who is somewhat younger than your average yellow blooded individual. They have used PHP, MySQL and iPhones and a smidgen of Java.

During their time with us, they will have a baptism by fire of all the Lotus portfolio as we sell what use (note, not the other way round). I'll give them the opportunity to blog once they start on Monday. Hopefully they will agree.