I was our company's representative to a standards committee for a number of years. Most standards start out as something that was developed in house by one company or a group of companies. Microsoft submitting their file format to become a standard doesn't represent something that hasn't been done time and time again in the past and won't be done time and time again in the future.
Companies take something they created, create a working group among a standards body, and then open up what they have done to others.
The vast majority of letter ballot votes are going to be fore or against, without comments. When a letter ballot takes place the work on the standard has already been done in a working group, and most technical issues should have been raised and addressed in that working group.
Technical comments on a letter ballot are typically done by people who couldn't be bothered to participate in the working group. Many of the comments are usually valid, others are worthless, occasionally some are put forth by people with opposing interests that are just trying to prevent the process from moving forward.
From what I have read the main objections were related to Microsoft including all of it's "proprietary" features in the standard. Well the whole point of a company opening up their own work to the standards process is to gain a broader market by having what was their proprietary features adopted by others.
People complained that some of the features were not covered in enough detail so that another company could implement them. This is a file format, not a tutorial on how to implement certain features. If the information is there to record the aspects of that feature, implementation is up to the company that implements it. It allows compatibility to be developed, but it doesn't need to show how to implement features.
The other argument seemed to be that there was already an existing document format that was standardized.
That's fine. However, that format may not have suited everyone's needs, and there is nothing wrong with competing standards. Companies are capable of choosing which standard suits their needs best.
If other companies don't want to use the standard that Microsoft basically put forth, they are free to not use it. However, they shouldn't try and stop Microsoft from standardizing their format unless there were serious technical issues with how the format was described in the standards document. Standards groups aren't supposed to be places where companies try and restrain other companies from their own standards efforts.
If this process for ISO approval of OOXML had progressed according to what you have written, then there would be no problem or concerns.
Please go to the link I placed in reply #1 and read that article. Clearly, Microsoft has corrupted the process as you outline it and is worthy of the scorn and derision they are receiving if the facts are as presented.
After reading this, I really hope you're lying about being on a standards committee. Unfortunately, I am equally convinced that you are in earnest. The problem is not Microsoft "opening up their own work", it is the fact that they say they are, but they really aren't.
The whole idea of a standard is that I could take a copy of it, sit down at my computer and implement it (whether that means implementing a client/server, or the parser for a file format). With Microsoft's OOXML, that has not been the case so far. The standard has been sprinkled with little nuggets that are closed, that Microsoft alone can implement. References to proprietary work that do not open up that self same work. Moreover, there are other sections that act as little more than XML wrappers around Microsoft's proprietary formats. In other words, I still couldn't parse out a full OOXML document without also reverse engineering a proprietary format. I want you to think for a moment and list any other standardized file formats that allow this kind of nonsense. If Microsoft wants to keep their formats proprietary, that is their own business, but a proprietary format flies in the face of the very idea of a standard (which is interchange; if interchange were unnecessary, standards would be as well) and should not be allowed to become one.
If Microsoft had introduced a truly open standard to the ISO and ECMA, the reaction would have been quite different. There would have been a lot of people who would have been wary of using it due to Microsoft's long standing policy of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. Others would have considered it superfluous after ODF had already passed. But you would not have seen the outrage against this mock standard.