I find just as many lessons in failures as success, although these are pretty arbitrary labels. Even the greatest success stories are littered with small failures overcome or even ignored.
Simon doesn't claim he invented PaaS, but he did predict it.
As far as learning from Zimki, I think the lesson Simon says he learned was basically (paraphrasing) "make sure you don't run out of political capital" and watching out for misaligned incentives.
I'm just a bit weary of people claiming they "invented the future" way back before the future actually came.