The Real Issue is Sir Jony Ive is Not Being Replaced

Sir Jony Ive is leaving Apple. You might have heard about it. John Gruber gives his take over on Daring Fireball and highlights the key issue about the departure – design is now reporting to operations. (I know Gruber doesn’t like formal titles, which is fair enough, but I’m a Brit so I have to use them!)
It makes me queasy to see that Apple’s chief designers are now reporting to operations. This makes no more sense to me than having them report to the LLVM compiler team in the Xcode group. Again, nothing against Jeff Williams, nothing against the LLVM team, but someone needs to be in charge of design for Apple to be Apple and I can’t see how that comes from operations. I don’t think that “chief design officer” should have been a one-off title created just for Jony Ive. Not just for Apple, but especially at Apple, it should be a permanent C-level title. I don’t think Ive ever should have been put in control of software design, but at least he is a designer.