Is anyone really surprised that Microsoft continues this behavior? For the fan-boys (not that I expect there are many): the purpose of standards, whether you like them or not, is to ease development and promote products with actual value - not merely technology lock-in. Having maintained a C compiler for Rabbit Semiconductor and read the C99 standard, I can say it is an improvement on C90. Contrary to certain comments by Microsoft employees in the article claiming irrelevance of C, it remains very relevant to the embedded systems community. If we, as developers, want standards to prevail, we must eschew nonconforming implementations. You've heard of "vote with your dollars", now "vote with your code".