I suggest watching the 2nd day keynote (by Herb Sutter, member of the standard's committee) of the ongoing GoingNative 2012 conference. In the last part of his talk he points out that the biggest weakness of C++ is the too small standard library (he compared it to C#/Java that have tens of times bigger standard libraries). According to his words the standard's committee is going to work together with big companies/organizations/library vendors like Boost, Poco, Qt, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc to deliver more useful consistent libraries during the next few years. He mentioned that what the committee has in mind are: filesystem, networking, serialization, HTTP, HTML/XML/JSON, compression, cryptography, audio/image/video manipulation, database interaction, etc.

This shows that the criticism against a too small standard library is justified, the standard's committee has itself realized that fact. For those who think that C++'s standard library is supposed to be tiny and you are supposed to get your libraries from the outer space, you're wrong. Won't stay that way.