You almost never hear from IBM anymore, except once a quarter when they announce record earnings.

It's time they got some proper respect. It's time they got their props. (Image from the BBC.)

This year IBM will bring in $4.66 in profit for each share of common stock, currently worth about $85. It has sales of almost $93 BILLION per year now, and brings $8 billion of that to the bottom line. (By contrast Microsoft, which claims it has run out of ideas, has one-third the sales, albeit nearly the same level of profit.)

Ah, yes, you say, but what has IBM done for me lately?

• IBM has announced precisely what its earnings would be if it expensed all stock options.
• IBM's eFuse will let its chips repair themselves, although most of the publicity has just called this a "chip morphing" technology.
• IBM has made its Cloudscape relational database open source, giving powerful database technology to the Apache server.
• IBM may buy Novell and could easily buy Sun.

While Microsoft has gone off into a mid-life crisis, while Apple has become a consumer electronics outfit, while the U.S. software industry has gone down the tubes, while the bulk of the chip industry has gone overseas, IBM has quietly gone on about its business.

It is time to give IBM its props. IBM is once again the "big dog" of the computer industry, the unquestioned leader. As it was 30 years ago so it is again.

And this time, no one has noticed.

Until now.