Win32 is a much, MUCH larger beast than POSIX. POSIX is a fairly small specification compared to Win32. A lot of the useful stuff on Unices is vendor-specific,

Win32 is a much, MUCH larger beast than POSIX. POSIX is a fairly small specification compared to Win32. A lot of the useful stuff on Unices is vendor-specific, but a lot of software is written with portability in mind so not a lot of them require vendor-specific APIs. Countrary to Windows. You wouldn't believe the enormous amounts of stuff that Windows has, and apps rely on almost everything they can rely on. COM is huge. DCOM is huge. DirectX is huge. The list goes on and on.