A lot of good information to be sure. You are well versed in the process. Far more so than I. That is clear.
However, my objection to the whole thing falls at a point way before anything you wrote is of any consequence. It is not a question of motivation but of tactics.
The following information is what I find disturbing and if true cannot be what you would call a normal part of the process or a 'load of crap'. It can't be. Furthermore, I don't believe that this employee did so without MS knowledge.
"Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard."
I agree that is very disturbing.
However, it's almost impossible for a large company to prevent each and every one of their employees from doing something stupid.
Microsoft said the offer, when discovered, was quickly retracted and that its Sweden managers voluntarily notified the SIS, the national standards body.
"We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy," said Tom Robertson, general manager for interoperability and standards at Microsoft. "That communication had no impact on the final vote."
The offer was rescinded by upper management as soon it was discovered that it was made, and Microsoft informed the standards body about the incident.
From the same article:
But bloggers claiming to have been present at the SIS meeting wrote (here and here) that more than 20 companies showed up in the waning moments of the meeting with the sole intent of voting in favor of Open XML.
While that's being used to make it sound like Microsoft was buying votes, it's not unusual.
Standards meetings are EXTREMELY boring affairs. At any one time usually only about 20% of the people there understand or even care about the particular portion of the standard that is being discussed.
It's like sitting in a really boring class where 90% of the material won't even be on the test. A lot of people cut class.
You go to these meeting every couple of months. You learn who is knowledgeable about what and working on what. If you have a particular issue with something, you can show up at the meeting, sit through a couple hours of things that don't concern you, and 90% of which are editorial issues rather than content issues. If you're lucky the meeting won't get sidetracked into some argument between two opposing groups who want different implementations (the usual result is that both implementation get included), and neither group is completely happy. If you're very lucky they might even get to the topic you are concerned about and you can make your concerns known and try and get something changed.
Or you can have lunch with a guy you know from another company that is deeply involved in that standard, express your concerns and have them bring them up in the meeting, and since they have a better understanding of the standard as a whole they can probably make the point better than you can if it is a valid point.
When important votes come up, attendance swells. A lot of times they need to go round up all the people that are out in the hall talking on their cell phones, trying to get work done.
The vote gets held, then over half of the people in the room either disappear, or go back to working on their laptops.
People think that standards are some big universally accepted thing.
Most of the standards I saw approved cam out of small working groups, and were put forth by one or two companies who were interested in gaining wider acceptance for their products through standardization, and few of they became widely used outside of that small group.
In the main meetings where letter ballots are voted on for standards coming out of committee, most companies vote in favor of whatever the working group decided simply because the issue doesn't concern them. Most of the comments that are generated are editorial to make the standard easier to read and understand, but I never saw a standard shot down because another group didn't want it standardized.
Writing a standard is an effort to put how something is done in clear, concise, and understandable language. It's a very slow process and I've yet to see any significant standard that doesn't end up with some parts being ambiguous regardless of how much effort is put into it. You rarely even see how parts are unclear until someone else tries implementing it.
There's bound to be some flaws in OOXML, doubtless there are flaws in ODM as well. However, at some point you decide it is as good as you can get it at that point, push it out, take a short break, and then you start on the next revision.
The only time the process ends is if people cease to care about that particular standard.