get a handful of those to convert in order to get ratification

Of course, they also need to keep others from converting to a "no" because they are offended by Microsoft's cold calculating tactics and their opinion that it is entirely proper for a new ISO standard to be barely able to squeeze through a vote with boughten friendship at your side. Microsoft is clearly ignoring the fact that many "yes with comments" votes should actually be interpreted as "no with comments".

Many of the comments that were submitted had common threads and were put together by people who oppose this activity

Oppose what activity? Lots of people and many NBs oppose this bad and useless standard, certainly, but what principal activity is there that Mundie means people oppose? The activity of pushing a broken, immature draft standard through a vulnerable system with ugly methods? How can people see such activity take place and not oppose it?

And regarding those common threads: of course the early comments published on the Internet had an influence on what later reviewers and NBs commented on. When presented with a 6,000 pages document and given the task of reviewing it in five months, with summer vacations in the middle of everything, most people will certainly look for guidance to sections where to look for errors and see if they agree with those earlier findings. The open wiki from BSi on the subject was probably used as a source of information by many other countries as well. This is not abnormal in any way. ISO review is open and not under secrecy, so comments may be freely shared among reviewers, and comments which are based on actual problems with the draft should be fairly consistent across NBs even if they were discovered independently.

In a document with so many obvious errors, people are bound to comment on similar things even without any exchange of information. My own review resulted in very few, if any, unique comments. Most of the problems I found independently were in retrospect very similar to what others also found. The point here is not who found the flaws and who reported them first, but the fact that a large number of national bodies have agreed on them and submitted them, plus had a large amount of unique, independent comments. The more NBs that agree on a comment, the more important it is to address it. Judging whether a comment is "hostile" or not should simply not be an issue. If NBs are perceived as enemies by Microsoft, then ISO is also their enemy, and that is definitely not a healthy approach. ISO is not an entity to be dominated and conquered, it is an entity to persuade with technical arguments. If a comment was submitted, it should be addressed. Anything else is an insult to the submitting NB and will be perceived as such.

Will Microsoft now do as they did with the contradiction period before fast track, and say that "these comments are hostile and entirely without merit, so we will ignore them"? All comments are still formal comments submitted in agreement by NBs, they are neither evil stabs from competitors nor crazy rants from free software maniacs. Comments made to point out fundamental flaws in DIS 29500 can not be ignored without risk of insulting the submitters and make them vote "no", even if their original vote was "yes with comments".

But I guess I shouldn't be complaining, since that is actually what I would like to see happen. From a purely technical standpoint, the best way to handle this would be to retract DIS 29500 and re-submit it after it has been properly fixed. If ECMA and Microsoft won't retract it, a "no" vote would give the same result.

This September Microsoft's ISO fast-track rubber stamp defeat was just another strategic step towards Endsieg¹ of the Office Open XML format. Craig Mundie who will succeed Bill Gates next year made this clear ( APCMag interview):

We were actually quite enthused with the number of countries even at this stage in the balloting process who voted to approve the standardisation at the current level. While there were a number of countries who either abstained or voted procedurally 'no with comments.'

We view it as a relatively positive outcome. We certainly would have preferred that it had gotten ratified at this point, but we are not at all deterred from thinking that people will ultimately endorse ISO standardisation.

Now, this site Noooxml.org serves all those who endorse ISO standardization and defends ISO standardisation against a hostile takeover from the vendor. That is why the implication that 'support of a broken OOXML specification' and 'ISO standardisation' are virtually the same is just another cheap semantic twist.

FUD against a superb standard named OOXML?

Most people would expect that bugs of the the format get fixed now. But Craig aims for a 'minimum fix' as expected by some industry analysts.

We are fairly confident that having looked at the comments, that certainly most of them will be readily resolved and that a lot of the countries who voted 'no pending comment' are likely to switch to a yes. We literally only need to get a handful of those to convert in order to get ratification.

Oh,- and Craig doesn't like the new movement and does not like the review by those standard bodies where work was not totally obstructed:

There are a lot of people who have raised a great many issues which we don't think have a lot of practical merit, but serve the purpose of creating some anxiety during this process. Many of the comments that were submitted had common threads and were put together by people who oppose this activity.

It seems to me, filing OOXML bug reports is still perceived as hostile action against a brave company that wants to benefit its users by fast-tracking a premature proprietary standard proposal that follows virtually the same objectives than the existing ISO standard 26300 and that promotes the participation of underprivileged standard bodies from the South on a grand scale. Watch Craig Mundie smile here. The interview covers also many other visions of Microsoft's Mundie:

So despite the power of the machines that people have on their desk today, we really still think that this whole evolution is in its infancy and over that longer time horizon, we are likely to see some fairly dramatic changes.