Actually I see a trend where C++ is used less and less in application development and its place taken by Java or C# mainly (although Objective-C can be heard as well). I think the main problem arises from something that is in the first post, the "C/C++" thing, as they were the same language.
One side is that trying to make C++ compatible with C obfuscated its grammar quite a bit, and some C++ concepts are difficult to grasp just because its, lets say, awful syntax.
The other side is that many efficient C programmers present themselves as C/C++ programmers, just with very little C++ knowledge (that is, they are great writing C code but they suck writing in C++), as if both were the same language. Because of this, filtering C++ candidates out from "C/C++" candidates is very difficult without an extensive battery of tests, that you can only afford at the end of the selection process.
And you may discover that none of the candidates is what you are actually looking for, but as you need real help anyway, you end up hiring a half cooked developer that writes half cooked code. If you are not careful your app becomes a nightmare of allocation bugs, calls to the wrong method and so... some of them only appearing randomly in difficult to reproduce situations. And sometimes, due to fragmentation, you cannot find anyone with experience in a certain toolkit, that is more difficult to happen in Java or C# where there are extensive standard library classes.
As well, for whatever reason Java and C# are different enough so they are not considered a superset of C, so when you interview a C# programmer, you know perfectly what you've got in front of you. A good C++ programmer is difficult to find because that confusion with C.
I am currently evaluating the implementation of some embedded products in Java as it is easier to find good Java programmers (till now we have been using C++ and Qt, technically an excellent combination).
I think these are issues that have been suffered by the whole industry and now C++ is paying for that.
C is the other way around, it is a very small, relatively easy to use language, that has been extending more and more. In embedded hast taken almost any niche, do you know anyone programming in assembler?? (for sure not as many as 10 years ago). C looks quite robust with a more or less constant share.
Just because I like to support what I say with factual data, just a link:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
(have a look at the long term trend)
Cheers