Nokia was one of the smartphone pioneers with their 770 Internet Tablets. It's hard to understand why they embraced Microsoft when the last product from this line, the N9, was so widely acclaimed and IMHO doomed to succeed.
I work for Ericsson - we are now allowed other phones after the partnership with Sony dissolved.. That said, the patent lawsuits related to Samsung have previously interfered with the selection.
What an excellent way to ignore valuable input.
If your employees would rather have your competitors product then you need to get to work rather than to forbid them to use it you need to make it so they would prefer to use their own.
Back then, Ericsson (And later, Sony Ericsson) was working really hard to make great phones, as well, and they certainly did. I never felt like I was lacking with my Ericsson phones even if it wasn't the same as everyone else's Nokia 3310.
Just like it's hard to make the new Facebook, it was hard to beat Nokia. Remember, back then, everyone was using Nokia 3310. It didn't just take a better product to become the thing everyone wanted to have, because everyone didn't want a mobile phone. They wanted a Nokia mobile phone.
I do not know much of how it is now. My dad went to Aastra Technologies 5+ years ago. I did enjoy being one of the first boys in school to get a phone, even though everyone followed up with getting a Nokia 3310 and I was left with the "unpopular" phone.
Connecting people, is somewhat like the Microsoft vision of giving everyone a personal computer. And while there are people in certain parts of the 3rd world that doesn't have mobile phones, I would say Nokia did an amazing job to get a mobile phone into everyone's hands.
My dad worked for Ericsson, so I've never owned a Nokia phone, you were the "evil rivals" after all, but I bow my head to Nokia for what they did, for how many people they connected with mobile phones.
Nokia might not have been the company that profited from SmartPhones, but they were the company that created the market for SmartPhones.