Our company needs a specific Microsoft account, not attached to a specific employee, to be the "Account Holder" for our Azure subscriptions.
Azure only allows one and only one account holder, you see, and more than one person needs access to the billing information for these accounts. Setting up a specific account for that purpose solves that problem.
So, I went ahead and set up an email account for our putative Azure administrator, and then went to the Live ID signup process. It asked me for my "birthdate." Figuring, what the hell?, I entered the birthdate of the company.
That got me here:
Annoying, but fine, I get why they do this.
So I got all the way through the process, including giving them a credit card to prove I'm real, and then I got this:
By the way, those screen-shots are from the third attempt, including one giving them a different credit card.
I have sent a message to Microsoft customer support, but haven't gotten an acknowledgement yet. I think I'm just going to cancel the account and start over.
Update: Yes, killing the account and starting over (by denying the email verification step) worked. So why couldn't the average pre-teen figure this out too? This has to be one of the dumber things companies do.