After being promoted to Apple's Senior Vice President of all Design, London-born industrial designer Jony Ive's prominence both internally and externally has raised tremendously as a result. Ive's become arguably the most important Apple exec as he now gets to control and oversee key aspects of the company's product development efforts.

According to Walter Isaacson's bio book on Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder ensured there was no one at the company to boss Jony around. Small wonder then that the blogosphere went into overdrive as Ive's bio photo disappeared from Apple's corporate Leadership web page earlier this morning, albeit only briefly.

The page wouldn't show Ive among the high-ranked Apple executives, such as CEO Tim Cook and SVP of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller. Making matter even more peculiar, the URL never stopped working and would continue to take visitors to Ive's bio page.

Shortly after Ive's photo was back up again, an Apple spokesperson said in a written statement that the brief removal was the work of a technical glitch and cautioned bloggers not to read too much into it...