If your 401k is normal and if your investments are average, chances are you are a whole lot poorer than you were about this time last year. The recession has done a nasty number on most investment portfolios. Not so in the technology sector. That is why savvy investors are taking a second look at Blue Chip investments right now. On April 28, IBM decided to go ahead and shock the analysts and please their investors. They knocked up the cash dividend on their shares. Now, with a 10% increase (55 cents per share), IBM can proudly say that they have increased dividends for 14 years in a row.

There is no way that the 10% dividend increase was a mere gesture of kindness. IBM, like any gigantic publicly-traded company, doesn’t just engage in “gestures of kindness.” Business is business. What this tells us is that IBM is not getting ravaged by the R-word like other industries are right now. What this tells us, on a broad scale, is that the technology sector is getting through the slowdown unscathed.

And it’s not just dividends that are increasing for IBM. At the close of the 1st quarter last week, they posted a nice profit. Furthermore, they had a lot of cash on hand-more than enough to buy Sun Microsystems (if they had thought about it before Oracle). They started running some strategic initiatives which probably didn’t include a hunker-down-and-wait-for-the-recession-to-go-away approach. They began running quicker and smarter operations in their plants. All of this strongly suggests that IBM wasn’t feeling any sort of financial pinch.

But before you go out and buy a bunch of Big Blue, watch out. They might be buying it all back. In addition to heralding some big numbers at the end of Q1, they also mentioned that they have 3 billion bucks that they will use to buy back their stock. What does this mean? Nobody really knows, but it does suggest one thing: IBM isn’t going out of business anytime soon.