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.