Mick Moignard, our Senior Technical Editor, is at Lotusphere all week and his full analysis (assuming he gets any sleep on his flight home to England) should be in next week's issue.

In the meantime, I wanted to discuss my impressions and some discussions I had with folks at the show. The biggest news from Lotus was that LotusLive, the product we've all known as Bluehouse, is now an official cloud service. Most Notes jockeys won't experience too much change from this, but all indications are that Bluehouse is a winner, so LotusLive will likely be, as well.

Lotus also announced a new alliance between BlackBerry-maker RIM and IBM. This is a very good thing. As I've been writing, BlackBerry security is an increasingly important issue. Since many of us use BlackBerry handhelds to access our world, a strong IBM alliance is always a good thing.

Even though there were no really big Notes and Domino announcements, one of the more refreshing take-aways from the event was what wasn't there. There was none of the usual "Notes is dead" discussion at all. Lotus has done an excellent job in the last year of not only building on the Notes/Domino platform, but executing solid messaging that helps customers and vendors feel good about it.

Speaking of vendors and feeling good, I spoke to a lot of Lotus Business Partners at the product showcase, many of whom expressed some level of unease due to the economy. The showcase was missing a few vendors. There were six or seven empty half-booths — about 5% (or less) of the total capacity.

The showcase was definitely missing traffic. The attendance level, at least on the exhibitor floor, was markedly down from last year.

Was the reduced attendance due solely to the economy? Answer: not entirely.

When I was a newly minted entrepreneur, way back in the day, one of the very first tradeshows I ever exhibited at was Macworld. That year, we spent a ton for our space, our booth, and our staff. We fully expected this to be not just a show, but The Show.

It didn't happen. On what was supposed to be the biggest attendance day of the show, the floor was deserted. The only booth to have anything resembling a crowd was a Symantec booth, but not because of their product.

You see, Macworld was on Superbowl Sunday. Even though Apple people are insane, rabid, freaky fans of Apple, they're also football fans, and Superbowl trumped Macintosh. Few attended and those who did camped out in the Symantec booth to watch the game on TV.