Everyone who cares about C already knows Microsoft's position on C99, as well as the bullshit recommendation of compiling C code as C++. And even if they did a complete about-face I doubt many would forgive them for being single-handedly responsible for countless broken reimplementations of <stdint.h>.

But there is a certain amount of schadenfreude from their refusal to implement even trivial C99 features for over a decade to "concentrate on C++0x", and yet have by far the most lagging C++11 implementation that likely won't implement many features for years to come.

But they are not the only commercial vendor doing this.

Many in the open source community only know GCC and tend to think everyone supports everything.

Since the early K&R C days, each commercial compiler vendor implemented the parts it liked to implement, while leaving out parts they were not so keen to provide.

Yes, and it's always sucked.

In the bad-old-days, of course, there was little choice but to use whatever (typically bad) commercial compiler one had available. So although these compilers generally sucked, that was just SNAFU.

But now things are different: GCC, and now Clang, provide high-quality and timely support for a wide variety of targets, and have set the bar much higher. The sucky commercial compilers of the past aren't really acceptable anymore.