Steve Jobs has been great as Apple’s CEO because he learned from his failures and went on to produce great products:

Steve Jobs’s announcement that he is stepping down as CEO of Apple is not surprising. He’s a very sick man; and running the world’s largest market-cap technology firm can’t be easy for someone with pancreatic cancer and who-knows-what other ailments. 

Lots of digital ink will be spilled about Jobs in the coming days, most of it focusing on his truly marvelous successes. 

It’s better to focus on his failures.

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Jobs (along with Steve Wozniak) brought us the Apple I and Apple II computers, early iterations of which sold in the mere hundreds and were complete failures. Not until the floppy disk was introduced and sufficient RAM added did the Apple II take off as a successful product. 

Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early 1980s. You remember Lisa, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But this computer — which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop — was another epic fail. Shortly after Lisa, Apple had a success with its Macintosh computer. But Jobs was out of a job by then, having been tossed aside thanks to the Lisa fiasco. 

Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, which was a big nothing-burger of a company. Its greatest success was that it was purchased by Apple — paving the way for the serial failure Jobs to return to his natural home. Jobs’s greatest successes were to come later — iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and more. 

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There’s a moral here for a Washington culture that fears failure too much. In today’s Washington, large banks aren’t permitted to fail; nor are large auto firms. Next up will be too-big-to-fail hospital systems. Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.

I’ve never been a fan of Michael Kinsley. He has never seemed too like a very thoughtful lefty. But this the article he has written about Microsoft and politics makes me reassess how I feel about him. Kinsley concludes:

As the Microsoft example suggests, the Washington culture of influence peddling is not entirely, or even primarily, the fault of the corporations that hire the lobbyists and pay the bills. It’s a vast protection racket, practiced by politicians and political operatives of both parties. Nice little software company you’ve got here. Too bad if we have to regulate it or if Big Government programs force us to raise its taxes. Your archrival just wrote a big check to the Washington Bureaucrats Benevolent Society. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to do the same?

Here’s a story I’ve told before but without the name. Lanny Davis was special counsel to the president in the Clinton administration and a personal friend of the Clintons. He called me shortly after I got to Microsoft to say how sorry he was that we’d missed each other as I was leaving Washington and how much he hoped to stay in touch. Oh yes, and he felt terrible about all the bad publicity and unfair government harassment my boss, Bill Gates, was getting. He would love to give him some help and advice. Could I put the two of them together? The answer, of course, was that I couldn’t. But the odd thing was that, at that point, I had never even met Lanny Davis.