The INQUIRER's top ten tech firm and band matchups

STICKING WITH our Friday afternoon musical theme, and to further honour the dream partnership between Symantec and Snoop Dogg which inspired The INQUIRER's very first rap, we've put together our matchups between the worlds of technology and music that we have figured out or we'd love to see.

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 with around 10 per cent of the Peoplesoft workforce 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.

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 that permanently hides behind sunglasses, probably because he has as many crows feet as he does Gold records, while the Edge is never far from a hat, suggesting that his 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 Macbook, 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.

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 kowtowed to China. Britney snogged Madonna, while 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 ingénue that we'd fallen in love with before.

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 that there is one major similarity between the two.

IBM is sturdy, inoffensive and dependable, and in this is 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 all in, 32 million of her long-playing dirges have found their way into consumer 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 $100 billion in 2009.

It has never done a duet with Eminem though.

BT / Chris de Burgh
It seems only fair while we are 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 of BT and its stomach churning, ‘aren't our Internet connections great?' ads with the bile-inducing Kris Marshall.

Even Ofcom is sick of it and has asked the firm to stop using those adverts to make outrageous claims about its performance. What revelation is next? Was it really a lady in puce?

Inquiring minds want to know!

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 don't hold up to any 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.

Microsoft / Guns N' Roses
As Guns N' Roses lost all of its talent and spent 15 years trying to get its sixth album off the ground, 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 hopelessly bloated and unable to live up to the hype. You could say, Microsoft really did use its illusion to create something that cost huge amounts of cash and in the end hurt its reputation.

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 October of 1969.

The Grateful Dead came out of the hippy consciousness of the late 60s and the hippy movement of tolerance, free love and gentle cooperation adopted the band as its mascot. The band turned away from the ways of the commercial music business based in Los Angeles and encouraged its fans to make bootleg recordings of its live concerts, and as a result attracted a fiercely loyal following of Deadheads that followed it to concerts all around the US for many years.

Linux is the operating system that's a philosophical descendant of the 60s hippy movement. Built upon the Free Software tool-chain written by Richard Stallman and the GNU project, and released under the GPL by its creator, Linus Torvalds, the Linux OS is enhanced at a furious pace by a large worldwide following of users and developers that perceives greater value in sharing open source code and cooperating in a free community of developers and users than through the commercial pursuit of private gain by hoarding software merely to make money.

Apple / Lady GaGa

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

The similarities are obvious. Like Lady Gaga, Apple often sings about its too cool phone, 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 tech media.

More than that though, both like to indulge in grand spectacles that for the non-converted are nothing more than an exercise in style over substance. Like Lady Gaga, Apple could fill a stadium with adoring fans, all of whom would defend its invention 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 eyepatch, we imagine he will stick to the turtleneck and jeans for many years to come.

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 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.

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