Have you actually tried contacting Microsoft about this? Your assumption of why it failed may not even be correct.

My assumption of why it failed isn't very important, it could be wrong, but the symptoms (cannot input a non-hungarian billing address, cannot signup) and final result (gave up) are the same.

Anyway I tried to contact them through twitter (no answer) after going here (the page linked as "contact us for support"):

http://www.windowsazure.com/it-it/support/options/

Here I can:

* get payed support (which I cannot buy)

* something literally translated as "Visit the overflow of the stack". Funnily enough, Bing's automatic translation translates "visit stackoverflow" better than this.

* go to an MSDN forum. Which I did.

There, among plenty of thread of people unable to signup, I found this thread[0] In which the MS support person states (I will translate for you)

"The reported error is sadly common during signup, and finding the cause is hard (sic).

I suggest you double check you input correct data, check that you card is valid and that azure is available in your country. You could contact your financial institution to get more help or phone us"

Notice that this is a terrible answer because at this point they already know my card is valid and have in fact already detracted 1€ from it (both for me and the thread creator), and if azure isn't available in my country (which it is) why did they let me get to this point of the signup?.

Then there are three more replies from people getting the same result, opening multiple support tickets and not getting any answer. One month later there is another reply from support stating that debit cards cannot be used for signup, sorry we don't say that anywhere. This was one year ago, they still don't say that anywhere.

Awesome, but I was already trying with my credit card, after I failed to sign up with 2 debit cards (all of which got succesfully charged for every attempt).

Honestly, would you have kept trying at this point, hoping that in one month they get back to you?

[0] http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsazure/it-IT/6...

Have you ever tried Microsoft Support (even if you have a fully paid up gold partnership agreement)?

At best you'll get some low end support peon who doesn't know ass from elbow. At best you get denial.

Then there's Microsoft Connect, their public bug tracker (for products they feel like pretending to support), which basically is a route for them to close every ticket straight away as not reproducible despite being reproducible by hundreds of people.

I've tried Azure support, and it was pretty good.

It was until the day it was down last year. At which point it was hopeless for nearly a week. I was on the end of a down system deployed to Azure as the technical contact. Not fun.

I'd imagine. That sucks :(.

If you are still interested in trying Azure, shoot me an email (thmacie at microsoft dot com). I'll see if we can fix your problem.

Taking a plane or get a new card? Why not just use a proxy? It's pretty common to limit fraud by going off people's IP address until you've got an established relationship with them. Using a credit card from another country is a huge fraud flag.

My Office365 account is listed as being in "Colombia" (CO) and insists on a Colombian address if I want to update my billing info -- despite my current billing address being Colorado (CO) and me never having been to Colombia. Tech support says there no way to change this, that my account will permanently be set as Colombia, despite it being obvious that the current billing address is Colorado (and Wells Fargo doesn't even have banks in Colombia, AFAIK).

Seems like companies just really suck when it comes to multi-country handling. Xbox lets me buy games, proceeds to download them completely, then does a geo-IP check and says "Corrupted". Xbox support insisted my hardware was bad (despite many other games downloading just fine), until I mentioned I wasn't in the US. Only at that point did they figure out there was a geo-IP check going on after the download that leads to the "Corrupted" error. They were actually going to completely replace my Xbox unit, determining the motherboard or something was selectively corrupting data for specific games. The remedy: "Oh move back to the US". No refunds or anything. (Real remedy: PPTP.)

Google takes it a step further, and disables updates for apps if they aren't available in whatever it determines to be your current region. I installed the Wells Fargo app, then went travelling. During that time, WF app releases a critical security update and ceases functioning until updated. Android points out "update available". But if I tap it to update, it says that app is not found.

Google Play also takes your physical location to customize part of the UI[1] language, inconsistently.

Netflix does the same[2]. They do even worse though, disallowing the audio language for subtitles, depending on region. In the US and watching with someone that's not fluent English? Too bad, only English subtitles. In Central America and want English subtitles? Nope, just Spanish or Portuguese (?! Portuguese isn't even in the top 5 languages spoken around here).

1: http://imgur.com/F1QlQ9U 2: http://imgur.com/yy7emGI

I'd flag you for fraud and ask you to contact support too.

(Former fraud prevention research scientist)

Ok. Would you do only that or also one of these options

* put an error message "you are trying to use a card issued in X from Y, contact support"

* put a prefilled unchangeable field containing the current country

* signal an error on all fields when I insert something invalid (say, country and city) rather than only the zip code

* block the transaction before you validate my card

Because if so, you're better than what is currently available. If not, I'd be happy to understand what would be the downsides of doing these things :)

EDIT: also I realized now: you'd flag me if I put a non matching _billing address_ rather than if I use a card from abroad? That seems counterintuitive :)

The general rule is, you never tell someone suspected of fraud why they are suspected of fraud; it will help them figure out how to not be suspected of fraud in the future. You also want to give them as many required telephone interactions as possible. A) this slows them down if they are trying to automate the process and B) It's much easier to determine whether or not someone is trying to defraud your service over the phone.

If the credit card you are using is stolen, eventually the billing company will have to charge back your purchase. Enough chargebacks in a month and the billing company gets a HUGE fine. It is in their interest to err on the side of caution in cases where something like this occurs.

Also, you generally don't tell someone that's suspected of fraud that they are suspected of fraud. You tell them there's a technical difficulty, and they need to call.

Of course, but your observation is not terribly useful given that per riffraff, pre-sales support of this sort is not available.

Good thing that not everybody thinks like you. Otherwise, traveling would be a nightmare.

You might be able to use a Chrome plugin called Stealthy to make it appear like you are browsing from Italy so it matches your card to test your idea.

Using a web proxy is going to trigger even more alarms, not fewer.

Maybe it's because of the company structure that their product managers (or product designers) don't care so much about thorough usability testing. Maybe that's why they lose ground to other giants all the time. I mean who would expect Apple to sell more laptops than all PC vendors combined?!

Apple does not sell more laptops than all other PC vendors combined. Not by a long shot.

http://www.dailytech.com/Chromebooks+Capture+21+Percent+of+2...

But they do make more money (profit) on consumer PCs than the PC vendors, which is a bit mind blowing.

PC vendors are mostly selling a commodity product, competing on price, so the margins are slim. Apple is selling an image, which reduces the price competition, and increases the margins. They also only target the top of the market; a lot of the PC volume comes in at the very bottom end, which Apple doesn't even touch: you can't get a mac for less than $600, and they don't ship anything with less than an i5, skipping three tiers of Intel processors.

They are not selling an image, but one of the few laptops that doesn't completely suck. If I could buy a 13" PC with a 2X screen and a trackpad that worked for $1200...that would last...I would totally be all over it.

So Apple is completely gone from the <$1000 tier (let alone < $600), and their laptops are generally acknowledged as the best. And here I am personally with a more expensive X1 Touch Carbon that is actually much less (touch, but low res screen + a trackpad that doesn't work).