The future of SVG is ?

I was an old SVG fan way about 3 DCB1 (before the Dot Com Bust 1). I'd lost track of it over the past few years as it was eclipsed by Flash and by Ajax based non-standard solutions. Work questions made me look it over again recently. Somewhat to my surprise, the technology may not be quite dead. So if Apple and Google decide to be nicer to each other than, say, Netscape and Sun @ 1997, we might see SVG play some role on small low bandwidth computing devices. Like, say, the iPhone.

But what about, you know, the IE web? On the one hand Microsoft's Silverlight is going to crush Adobe's Flash, so Apollo and Flash are irrelevant. Similarly SVG can't play on the larger web without Microsoft, so SVG seems irrelevant on the IE web too. On the other hand Google can't cede this battleground to Silverlight. (Apple of course can't either, but in this struggle they root from the sidelines).

So will Google buy Apollo/Flash (and/or Adobe)? Or will Google embed SVG support in the Google toolbar and thus bring it to IE / Vista? Or bet on both horses, since either is safer than Silverlight? (Adobe's SVG plug-in was never relevant, so let's not even mention it.)

This will be interesting to watch ...

If anyone sees evidence that Google is going to put an SVG reader into their toolbar code please send a note to jfaughnan@spamcop.net. I'm curious!