A few times in my life I've been fortunate to have seen the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights, and its simplistic beauty is able to take your breath away. The lights dance in the sky with no seeming conductor to guide it. It will shift in the blink of an eye, change color and dazzle your imagination. There's a disrespectful discourse in play and yet it's so beautiful there's nothing to judge. It's God laughing and you're mesmerized like a four year old seeing fireworks for the very first time. It's marvelous eye candy that has your brain popping with visual excitement. Yet when humans talk in such artistic abstracts it's more like a paintbrush wildly splashing paint on a canvas without meaning; some see that as art while others see it as ego gone mad.

When Apple's Jony Ive introduces a new product or a new version of a product, he uses the English language in artistic ways that makes your brain light up and applaud its colorful poetry and clarity. No one in the industry can match Jony Ive's product introductions even though copycat Samsung has desperately tried to do so over the years to no avail.

And then you have Google's VP of design, Matias Duarte, who actually tried his hand at the vision-thing with his latest interview with Wired UK. For me, it was more like listening to nails scratching on a chalkboard.

Duarte states, "Where will digital design be in ten years' time? Will we still be stuck using GUI interfaces and smartphones based on the original iPhone? I hope not. I really hope not. That would make me very sad and I'm doing my hardest to make sure that that is not the case."

Duarte adds that "Radically overhauling the design of our digital devices is no small task. Eight years on from the launch of the original iPhone we're still using rows of apps and touchscreen rectangles. And many of the design conventions our smartphones and tablets rely on are more than 30 years old.

Even the iPad Pro and the Surface Pro 4, praised by reviewers, are 'basically laptops,' Duarte says. 'I don't think you could really call it a significant fading of the laptop. It's a new blouse by the same name.'"

Apple's leap was a major one, pulling together ideas that had been "bouncing around" for some time. "It was almost like the industry knew some of the attributes that it wanted to have but it hadn't quite gotten the package right yet." Apple's leap changed the direction of consumer electronics. But what will be next?

Most of realize by now that Apple has always believed in bringing great hardware and software together to create a great product. Google's Duarte now thinks this is some great revelation as if the light just came on. Duarte notes that "If you're going to be a product designer and you're going to make furniture you're going to know a lot about your materials and manufacturing, and that's what makes you a designer." Yes, Duarte, you're late to the party on that front as Apple has been there all alone for the longest time, even when such a stand was considered to be odd-man out.

So what's Google 'Vision' – what are they working on now to prove some design point? Duarte was evasive. "Will it radically change the phone in everyone's pocket? I hope so. But even if I knew I couldn't tell you."

"I don't know that Android Wear has the right solution or even is on a vector to the right solution, nobody knows," Duarte says. "We're just trying things to see which are successful. That's what design is. You form a thesis, you try to do it without any ego or hubris."

And yet with such deliberate vagueness, somehow Wired considered this wondering diatribe of nothing to be Google's worthy Vision. If that's considered vision, then what would blind look like?

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