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A long time ago IT Pros could get quite a lot from Microsoft to set-up test environments as a "home lab". If you are in IT you can really only understand technology by using hands-on. You can only make recommendations from personal use. Unfortunately not all employers give people resources to keep their knowledge up to date. Instead home learning is a thing. You can build a home lab with either the free version of ESX from Vmware  or a free Hyper-V host from Microsoft. Next an old server or an HP Microserver would get you a basic home virtualisation platform. Software could come with Linux or you could splash out on a Technet Subscription at £99 per year. Sadly Microsoft ended Technet Subscriptions and replaced them with time limited evaluations. Not so good if you want to set up domain controllers and a test SQL server that you want to return to periodically. However it's better than nothing. However IT moves on. IT Pros need to understand about cloud services.

When Microsoft said that Windows 10 was the "last version of Windows" a lot of people didn't really know what that meant or were more concerned with the "free upgrade for 12 months". Over time it is really become clear what this is all about. There simply aren't any versions any more unless you are an on-premises IT Pro. What we are seeing is the monthly patch cycle on patch Tuesday and a couple of feature updates each year designated by year/month numbers. The first year anniversary update was 1607 was the July 2016 update - eventually released in the first few days of August 2016. The point is not to pick apart exact release schedules in the old style monolithic update every few years but rather to recognise we are in a new world. The cloud has now changed versions. You just sit there and your new feature update just piles in until your PC just stops working. Upgrades for life. Similarly businesses that have gone to the cloud just use Office 365 and