In contrast Apple with iPhone had much stronger position:
"Cingular gave Apple the freedom to develop the iPhone's hardware and software in-house, a rare practice at the time, and paid Apple a fraction of its monthly service revenue (until the iPhone 3G), in exchange for four years of exclusive U.S. sales, until 2011."
I think the last remaining example of that is charging for using your phone as a WiFi hotspot.
During that time I was working for a large Telco. I could see how Nokia operated. They did everything the telco asked for, they installed any bloatware just to keep their sales numbers high.
Apple in contrast would say: if you ever touch the user experience on our phone we will go to the other big Telco in your country. Guess who won.
A few days after iPhone was launched in June 2007 I heard an exec of a technical team defending the by then fairly obvious "ownage" by claiming that Apple had "cheated" by putting 1 GB of RAM into the device (which would be insanely expensive). Of course it was 128 MB. Nokia-adjacent company. He had misunderstood 1 Gbit from some teardown. That was the level of competency.
The software sophistication just really wasn't there at that level. (It was there at an IC/architect level though.) Apple raised the bar quite considerably.
Apple (or Steve Jobs) understood the value of the web (one of the crucial 3 pieces of the iPhone when it debuted) as a platform - though Apple pivoted over time to have iOS and the App Store itself.
That's just how organizations work. No one inside Nokia could realistically have acquired the power to make the decision in time. The company wasn't shaped to do this. They were doomed as soon as the tech caught up.