Warren Buffett, who said he was unable to predict the prospects for Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc., is betting more than $10 billion that International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) is a different kind of technology firm.

Buffett previously focused the stock portfolio at his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) on consumer brands like Coca-Cola Inc. and financial firms like Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), saying he was able to understand their business plans. The strategy meant he missed the rally in technology companies like Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM) and Nokia Oyj (NOK1V) and then their subsequent slumps.

Buffett invested $10.5 billion to $10.7 billion in IBM, betting on the company’s ability to maintain its market dominance in computer services and expand outside the U.S. Armonk, New York-based IBM gained 19 percent in the first nine months of the year as global stock markets plunged.

“Yes, they’re a tech company, but they will not have the wild swings that we’ve seen throughout history, like a RIM or a Nokia where they catapult up but then the technology shifts against them and they plummet,” said Louis Miscioscia, a Collins Stewart LLC analyst in Boston with a “buy” rating on the stock.

Before making the investment, Berkshire surveyed its own information-technology departments to see how they worked with suppliers and found many tended to stick with IBM, Buffett said today on CNBC.

“I probably read the annual report of IBM every year for 50 years,” he said. “I don’t think that there’s any company that I can think of, big company, that’s done a better job of laying out where they’re going to go and then having gone there.”

John Opel didn't want to run a hardware store after college and the great irony (pun intended) is that he ended up running IBM, the largest data processing hardware company in the world at the peak of its mainframe and midrange prowess.

Opel, who was 86, died on November 3. He was IBM's fifth CEO and without a doubt one of its better ones. Ginni Rometty, who will be IBM's ninth CEO when she takes over on January 1, has several sets of big shoes to fill. (Well, the assumption is that Lou Gerstner's were not that big physically, but virtually they were pretty big.) And as current and soon-to-be-retiring IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said, he believes Rometty is ready for the job and can do it, and there seems to be little doubt on anyone's mind, after a few weeks, that she can.

Open grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, where his father ran a hardware store. He got a BA in English at Westminster College in that state, fought in the Pacific Theater during World War II, and finished up his MBA at the University of Chicago in 1949. He had one job offer editing economic textbooks--the UoC is a hotbed for economics today, and was starting its rise back then--and for all we know, Opel might have gone on to be an economist had he taken that job. The other offer he had was from his dad, running the hardware biz.

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