Getting timing right is much much harder than knowing where that trend is going.
From my perspective, a mis-step is a missed opportunity to enter a market. The pushed forward with G+ and it failed. Compare that to Microsoft which failed to see these markets coming. Google had NFC support baked into the Android OS. They just needed to develop the app and use brite force to push terminals into the market. They could have even developed some kind of iOS bump app to get ahead to apple pay. Otherwise they're firing on all cylinders better than any company in history of that size and they've given themselves a ton of adjacent white space. No evolutionary dead ends here.
From my perspective, a mis-step is a missed opportunity to enter a market. The pushed forward with G+ and it failed. Compare that to Microsoft which failed to see these markets coming. Google had NFC support baked into the Android OS. They just needed to develop the app and use brite force to push terminals into the market. They could have even developed some kind of iOS bump app to get ahead to apple pay. Otherwise they're firing on all cylinders better than any company in history of that size and they've given themselves a ton of adjacent white space. No evolutionary dead ends here.