As you said. the Work/School Account is one provided by your employer (normally), and usually comes from Active Directory (or AzureAD).

The Personal accounts (also called Microsoft accounts/IDs or Live IDs) are the ones you as an individual create directly with Microsoft. The prime example would be people who've had a Hotmail account for ages, and that eventually became a Microsoft account.

The confusion comes because since a couple years ago, you can create Microsoft accounts with any e-mail that you own, be it personal, from work, hosted in gmail, hosted by your employer, hosted by yourself... You name it. So it is possible to create a Microsoft account with your work e-mail, even if your work e-mail also has a Work/School Account tied to it. All the notifications for that Microsoft account will go there, but they are not for your "Work/School Account" (also referred to as Organizational account), they are for your personal one.

Yes, it is a mess. After a while I got used to it and now I'm comfortable navigating all my identities, but it can be very annoying when you first encounter it.

It's not just annoying, this can cause authentication to be broken in subtle ways.

Indeed - heaven forbid you try to sign into Azure Storage Explorer with both! It invalidates the other (workaround: use a SAS)

Yes, but as a consumer I don't care about that differentiation.. Just make it transparent.. merge my authorization rules or something...

Gawd.. You're microsoft, you can create a whole new security protocol. Don't have this half baked persona solution.

If you can't figure this out, it really reinforces the reason for every time we come across something in Azure where we're like wtf isn't this feature supported?

I'd wager there's something enforcing that distinction such as licensing rules for products you might have access to.

But, ultimately, those licensing rules may be under MS's control as well. Even if they aren't, it sounds like it has a significant impact on their service's design and usability, so it's in their interest to make a change somewhere.

Your 'work/school account' is managed by your work. They can close it at any time, and you would no longer have access to it. Your personal account via the same email address is an account you created with Microsoft. Even if your work/school take away your email address, that account will still exist (just that if you no longer have access to that email you won't be able to retrieve password resets or whatever for it).

It doesn't matter. A collection of roles/claims are associated with each account, resulting in different authorization profiles.

Just merge them into a single collection and have my experience be dictated by that merged collection. With how entrenched they are with the Enterprise world, they should have foreseen this scenario and designed their family of products to facilitate this seamless merging of authorization rules across disparate accounts.

This.

Because user stories aren't: "I want to access my Office365 work account" or "I want to access my personal Microsoft account".

They're: "I want to edit or download a file I have access to in the Microsoft cloud" or "I want to find a file I have access to".

Work or school is a federated option, using ADFS to do the authentication using your company's Active Directory info. If you choose that, when you enter your work email address, it'll redirect you to your company's ADFS login page. It's used a lot with Azure AD.

That's a nice theory, but we don't have office 365 and I didn't create the account haha.

The 'non-company' account is created manually by signing up for a new microsoft account and then clicking the activation link in the email you receive.

The school/work account is somehow created by a company administrator, but I don't know exactly how or where.

This sounds right. So this prompt is essentially asking me to tell them which buttons my boss pressed when he created my account.