Top 10 technology vendor/celebrity partnerships

Snoop Dogg

Maybe looking to outdo rival McAfee in the big-name partnership stakes, Symantec has teamed up with rapper Snoop Dogg to fight cyber crime through the power of music.

In honour of this beautiful combination, we've put together our list of other technology vendor and musician combinations that we think would make sense.

10. Oracle/50 Cent
Oracle has embarked on an aggressive strategy and is seen as a bully, bulldozing a path to the top, much like platinum selling rapper 50 Cent.

Back in 2003, Oracle set its sights set on PeopleSoft while 50 Cent was preparing to launch a venomous lyrical attack on rival New York MC Ja Rule.

After having offers rejected by the PeopleSoft board, Oracle finally got its target in early 2005, at a cost of $10.3bn (£6.63bn). Oracle wasn't welcomed by the CRM firm, and the acquisition didn't get off to a good start when around 10 per cent of the PeopleSoft workforce were axed.

Similarly, 50 Cent made few friends on his way to selling 26 million records worldwide. After ending the career of Ja Rule, he embarked on numerous feuds, with notable victims including Cam'ron, Fat Joe, Rick Ross and even former friend and G-Unit member Young Buck.

9. HP/U2
What links HP and U2? Boring familiarity. Both would like to imagine that they are exciting and relevant, young and agile - in truth this is not the case.

Bono, the leader of U2, is a man who hides permanently behind sunglasses, probably because he has as many crow's feet as he does gold records, while The Edge is never far from a hat, suggesting that this hairline is in retreat.

These fashion statements are not surprising from a band that must be approaching a combined age of 200, but to the young must make U2 look like a relic from older, more bloated days.

HP might sell a lot of PCs and laptops, but we imagine that most students and 'tha kids' would opt for a flashier model like an Apple, much like they would prefer to see a band perform in a pile of its own beer and vomit than go to a stadium to hear some dad-rock.

8. Linux/The Grateful Dead
It was 1965 and Dr Timothy Leary was just getting up steam promoting LSD and his mantra "Tune in, turn on, drop out," while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were starting an odyssey in a converted school bus called 'Further' that would take them up and down the US west coast and into history in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test.

The band The Grateful Dead was founded that year in San Francisco and
provided much of the soundtrack for the Summer of Love in 1967 that
culminated in nationwide anti-Vietnam War Moratorium marches in 1970.

The Grateful Dead came out of the hippy consciousness of the late 1960s, and the movement of tolerance, free love and gentle co-operation adopted the band as its mascot.

The band turned away from the commercial music business based in Los Angeles, and encouraged its fans to make bootleg recordings of its live concerts. As a result its attracted a fiercely loyal following of 'Deadheads' who followed the band to concerts all around the US for many years.

Linux is the operating system that's a philosophical descendant of the 1960s hippy movement. It was built on the free software tool-chain written by Richard Stallman and the GNU project, and released under the General Public Licence by its creator Linus Torvalds.

Linux is enhanced at a furious pace by a large worldwide following of users and developers who perceive greater value in sharing open source code and co-operating in a free community of developers and users, than through the commercial pursuit of private gain by hoarding software merely to make money. It's The Grateful Dead.

7. Microsoft/Guns N' Roses
Guns N' Roses lost all its talent and spent 15 years trying to get its sixth album off the ground, so you have to wonder what made Microsoft realise this was the business model to follow.

While Axl Rose decided to fritter away his glory years fighting with Slash and his hairdo, Microsoft decided to feed its appetite for destruction by spending the best part of five years getting Windows Vista out of the door.

In the end, Vista, like Rose, ended up bloated and unable to live up to the hype. You could say that Microsoft really did use its illusion to create something that cost huge amounts of cash and in the end hurt its reputation.

6. Dell/Nickleback
We like Dell, don't get us wrong, but when it comes to the tech world, they're about as exciting as Nickelback.

Because, just as Dell churns out perfectly adequate, run-of-the-mill, get-what-you-pay for products, so too does Nickelback rehash endless rock-by-numbers anthems that sound sort of meaningful but hold up to no real scrutiny.

Take this example from Photograph, a song that somehow, inconceivably, was downloaded over one million times:

Look at this photograph
Every time I do it makes me laugh
How did our eyes get so red?
And what the hell is on Joey's head?

And while gravel-eating frontman Chad Kroeger (who looks a bit like Sarah Jessica Parker with a bit of beard) probably thinks these lines are acceptable to begin a song, so Dell is probably happy enough with its cosy, middle-of-the-road position.

Reviews are peppered with lines like: "Attractive and robust, but not groundbreaking" or "does exactly what it says on the tin" – Dell this is, not Nickelback - but such is the similarity, clarification is required.

5. BT/Chris de Burgh
It seems only fair while we're doing this list that compares IT firms to their musical equivalents that we offer up BT as the logical kin of Chris de Burgh, since in our opinion both are cringe-inducing British legends that no one will admit to liking.

Beattie, to give the firm its feminine name, is not a lady in red. In fact, given its years of incumbency, it is firmly in the black. But it is a tedious, old, unfashionable hang-about that trots out the same message time and time again.

Just as we are sick to the back teeth of Mr de Burgh telling us that a beautiful lady, who happens to be in red, is dancing with him, cheek to cheek, so are we fed up with BT and its stomach churning 'Aren't our internet connections great?' ads with the bile-engaging Kris Marshall.

Even Ofcom is sick of BT, and has asked the firm to stop making outrageous claims about its performance. What revelation is next? Was it really a lady in puce? We deserve to know!

4. Intel and AMD/Oasis and Blur
Intel's everlasting battle with AMD takes us back to the heady days of Cool Britannia and the very public feud between the two biggest bands at the time, Oasis and Blur. Just like 1995, everyone has a side they want to come out on top and, while Blur won the race to number one in the charts back then, it was Oasis that became the most profitable overall.

Intel, despite its troubles with courts and a penchant for big money purchases, still manages to sell to the crowd, just like Oasis until its very recent split, while AMD decided to change completely and buy ATI, mirroring Blur's shift into projects like Gorillaz.

Intel has now picked up on AMD's tendency for change by going after the mobile market. It's hoping to be the big Gorilla. AMD, on the other hand, is hoping to capitalise on its new box of tricks by mixing two core products and hoping for a hit single.

Even though AMD has changed, it's likely that the rivalry with Intel will live forever.

3. IBM/Dido
No one suspects that Dido is almost 100 years old, and there is certainly no suggestion that she ever had anything to do with Nazi gold, but we do think there's one major similarity between the two.

IBM is sturdy, inoffensive and dependable, not unlike Dido's first album. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and likewise we suspect that no one ever got offended by hearing Dido at a boring dinner party, or while stuck in a lift, or when holding on the telephone. Boring, vanilla, safe and pedestrian - and that's just the A-side.

Like IBM, Dido also seems to have some legs. That first album, called No Angel, sold 12 million copies, while 32 million of her long-playing dirges have found their way into consumers' hands, making her one of the best-selling artists of her time.

Meanwhile, IBM is the second largest IT and services firm in the world and, according to the Forbes 2000 rich list, clocked up sales totalling $100bn in 2009.

It has never done a duet with Eminem, though.

2. Apple/Lady GaGa
At first we couldn't agree on a comparison for Apple. Take That was touted since, like Apple, it too has seen the return of a prodigal son, as was Coldplay because on one hand it garners fervent support, while on the other it induces loathing. But Lady Gaga won out.

The similarities are obvious. Like Gaga, Apple often sings about its telephone, while its PR team remains pokerfaced when pushed to answer non-friendly questions, and both have had cause to moan about the paparazzi or, in Apple's case, and in the context of Antennagate, just the plain old media.

More than this, though, both like to indulge in grand spectacles that for the non-converted are nothing more than an exercise in style over substance. Like Gaga, Apple could fill a stadium with adoring fans, all of whom would defend its inventions to the very end.

When it comes to fashion, though, the similarities end. As much as we would like to see Steve Jobs in a feathered cod piece and eye patch, we imagine he will stick to the turtleneck and jeans for many years to come.

1. Google/Britney Spears
Remember when Google first appeared? Remember how fun it seemed with its funky algorithms and a bit of a sexy search bar-only layout?

How innocent it all seemed, much like Britney Spears, the young, fresh-faced, holier-than-thou pop sensation whose poptastic hits were probably even able to give Al Gore rhythm such was their jollity.

For years they were both at the cutting edge of cool, indisputably on the side of all that is good in the world, kicking back against the darkness of staid software firms and miserable landfill indie.

And then it all went a bit dark. Britney shaved her head, Google cow-towed to China. Britney snogged Madonna, Google decided privacy was for wimps.

We still wanted them to be part of our world. They were still kind of cool and sexy (after the hair grew back) in a scary sort of way. But secretly we couldn't help wishing they could go back to being the innocent ingénues we fell in love with.