Yes it is necessary. Microsoft has people like Herb Sutter talking about how awesome C++11 is and that Microsoft is totally committed to it. But then they support barely anything of C++11. They are the once holding back the adoption. GCC and Clang support all the core features.

Of course the people working on VC++ aren't dumb. But Microsoft is apparently not investing enough money. So it's absolutely necessary to call them out.

From the context, that seems to be a reaction to "variadic templates are too hard for us to implement" (paraphrased).

That's not what Herb Sutter said. If you watch the video, he said they just barely missed making the deadline for VS2012 and it would be available soon after.

I was developing programs for HPUX and visual studio between 1999 and 2002. I was such a pain that I have done my best (with success) to never code again in this language. By their very poor support of C++, I think that they have contributed a lot to the success of java.

This was actually a reason for Java's success in the enterprise.

Finally a OO language with proper use of Strings, exceptions, classes and available library, without having to litter your code with #ifdefs to manage portability across compiler vendors and operating systems.

Or reducing yourself to the common subset usually available, which has a bit hard to have across C and C++ compilers around 1996.

Nowadays we know better, but it was surely a reason among many others, for Java's success.

I state this, because I saw it happen live in the trenches back in the day.