What makes a corporate leader "visionary"? Spencer Reiss at Wired offers a murky window onto his view, in his profile of Richard Branson's new space tourism venture:

Despite such a dazzling career, the business world has always been ambivalent toward Britain's best-known entrepreneur. He launches trendy companies the way Trump builds casinos. But a farsighted innovator like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or even Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher he is not. Branson traffics in opportunism. He spots a stodgy, old-line industry, rolls out the Virgin logo, sprinkles some camera-catching glitter, and poof - another moneymaker. While that formula has kept him in champagne and headlines, no Virgin business has ever changed the world.

It's a murky window, though: Leaving aside the fact that Trump is in debt to his eyeballs and Branson wallowing in lucre, I'm not getting the distinction between Branson's "opportunism" and the "innovation" of Reiss's exemplars. What's the qualitative difference between Herb Kelleher's epiphany that there was room at the bottom of the air travel market with Branson's epiphany that there was room at the top? Or between Job's gut instinct about what would make pseudo-counterculturals perk up and drool and Branson's feel for the bleeding edge of music? Or between the fortuitous combination of timing and investor-expectations-management that allowed Jeff Bezos to make a success of Amazon, and the fortuitous combination of timing and investor-expectations-management that allowed Richard Branson to start a full-service transatlantic airline from scratch at the height of the discount boom, with prior portfolio in nothing more mission-critical than music retail?

The thing is, Virgin businesses have changed important bits of the world. Virgin Records (later Virgin Entertainment), for example, started as an independent label before the first wave of Punk, and after early flirtation with the Sex Pistols hitched their cart to the artsier, less purely rebellious side of new music (think XTC, Human League, Simple Minds) with great commercial success. In so doing, they paved the way for countercultural co-optation efforts like Warner's "independent" IRS label. Virgin Air challenged the conventional analysis on how to make money in the airline business (cut operating cost to the bone, get more butts on the plane even if you have to make the seats smaller to do it, and so on). Virgin Mobile found a way to bring European pay-as-you-go models to the less technically advanced American market, and in so doing forced American mobile phone companies to rethink their contract-lockin approach to the business. It's arguable that Branson has had a bigger impact on the American mobile telephony market than even the recent, much-ballyhood phone number mobility legislation.

As an aside, I don't actually have anything in particular against Herb Kelleher or Jeff Bezos, but describing Jobs as a "far sighted innovator" really does gall. As someone who's actually familiar with the history of computing, I'm unclear on exactly how Apple (a company who barely ever cracked 2 percent of the personal computing market) "changed the world" prior to the launch of iTunes in 2003. After all, the truly synergic applications for windowed operating environments -- Excel and Word -- both came from Microsoft, and Apple was neither the first, last, nor (objectively judged) the best. What they were, was the most optimal, and that had little if anything to do with Jobs per se. I defy anyone to name an original idea from Steve Jobs that became successful; despite his reputation for micromanagement (he penciled in changes to comps of the original iMac's design and signed off on the colors in the original lineup), his real genius lies in understanding and manipulating human vanity. That the success of virtually every successful Apple product since the launch of the Lisa is due to appeal to vanity is something that shouldn't be seriously challenged; that Apple is and always has been a niche player can't be seriously debated; that the cultural impact of a niche player seems out of proportion with their market cap shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's ever considered wearing paisley (the common term for this phenomenon is "fashion"). Above the hard technical level (which was more the other Steve's purview, in any case) Steve Jobs and Apple's impact on the world resembles that of Ralph Lauren more than that of even, say, Richard Stallman and the FSF.

Part of the problem may be that, at the core, Branson's "vision" is simply not technophilic enough for a Wired feature writer. His admission to the "vision club", after all, comes via Virgin Galactic:

Until now. Mojave Airport isn't just where aging jets wait to die; it's where the dusty dream of commercial space travel is finally coming alive. Last summer, a tiny winged wonder called SpaceShipOne spiked 62 miles into the desert sky on its way to nailing the $10 million X Prize for the first sustainable civilian suborbital flight. The world's stuffed-shirt airline chiefs took one look and went back to worrying about fuel prices. Branson took one look at the gleaming white carbon-fiber spaceship and said, Beam me up.

The music business isn't about gadgets, after all, and Virgin Mobile's phones were always technically on the low-end. (How else could they afford to make them cheap without requiring a contract?) Too, Virgin Galactic just smells of "big vision", though the real scope is small: Like Apple, it will directly affect only a very small population of users. To be sure, Branson will almost certainly make money on it, but its primary impact will be a matter of fashion -- and inspiration -- than of actual market effects. In business terms, its direct impact will be much smaller than that of Virgin Atlantic Airways or probably even of Branson's new V2 music label.