I don't know about Samsung, but Nokia went for "differentiation", so each year they released a bunch of phones which was differentiated by which features were missing. So instead of releasing 2-3 feature complete phones and they released a myriad of feature incomplete phones. This does nothing for their bottom line in terms of the extra product development costs, marketing costs and support costs (and consequently customer goodwill costs). Which meant the only phones that got some support (ie updates, bugfixes etc) were the models that sold the most, which left the owners of the less popular models with a bitter aftertaste.

For a while Nokia even had the bright idea of competing with itself. The phones were split into 2 divisions - one producing "business" phones (the E-series) the other producing "personal" phones (the N-series). The 2 divisions were hugely territorial, stuff developed at one division would not be given to the other. So you ended up with E phones having decent email software but crappy multimedia software and vice-versa EVEN though the software runs fine on both E and N phones. So if you were an E phone owner fed up with the crappy default music/video playback you had to trawl through Nokia's website to see if they had the N-series media player available as a separate download, download it and install it. Unfortunately most users aren't so savvy. Nokia's masterplan at that time was that (they hoped) you would have at least 2 phones - one for work and one for pleasure and hence their stupid tactic of crippling their phones.