I was thinking about that sort of thing after writing the post and wondering if I had the right image.
The horizon thingy is the Sprague-Gilder model. I don't see it as very visiony at all. It just ignores all the interesting detail along the way. You end up with a self-indulgent product which maybe no one is asking for.
But I guess you need some hazy sense of direction all the same, unless you're willing to get diverted wherever the market takes you. Each step has to go somewhere.
Maybe being visionary is a bit like a spider that floats a web on the wind, hoping it will attach somewhere in a general direction, and then, once attached, it builds its web one strand at a time.
Whereas with Sprague-Gilder, all that seemed to matter was the horizon.
At any rate, it was me trying to encapsulate what had occurred over two decades or so.