http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/wg4/archive/sc34-wg4-2009-0036.pdf

29500 Defects: Explanation of whether to resolve defects by Corrigendum or by Amendment

Defects in ISO/IEC 29500:2008
Explanation of whether to resolve defects
by Corrigendum or by Amendment
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG4
2009-03-26
[…]

However, ISO/IEC 29500 is a very large and complex multi-part standard, and it is not surprising that the text contains many unintentional technical defects, which nevertheless don't make it impossible to implement the standard.

In the course of drafting, some existing office document features were unintentionally overlooked, which result in it being impossible to fully represent some of the corpus of existing documents in ISO/IEC 29500.

The corpus of existing documents means Office 2007 documents, which is an undocumented file format.

The document N1101/N1168 contains for example, several items in which they recognize that there are decisions made in the BRM (BRM resolutions) which were not incorporated into the final published text of the standard. In other words, even taking almost a year after the aproval of the standard to publish the text (yes, approved without reading), there wasn’t time/attention or anything else necessary to assure that the changes were published in the text (most of those changes, “conditioned” the approval). What makes me much more angry about this is that during the BRM I asked about who would be responsible for verifying that all these changes would be part of the final text and the answer was ITTF (kind of joint ISO/IEC secretariat).

He may be wrong that this is the final proof of misconduct at the BRM under the lead of Alex Brown and its mission impossible to fix the standard. Following the shocking uncoverings Jesper Lund Stocholm, Alex Brown and Doug Mahugh are acting like little school girls with their gossip and giggles on Twitter. But there may be method to the madness. OOXML is already approved by ISO JTC1. Microsoft no longer needs to persuade the national bodies or influence the press or call out their business partners. It is enough for them to rely on social engineering in SC34, shmoozing, sponsorships, free dinners, free beer, etc.

The reporting of Groklaw about the Microsoft outbursts of unfiltered truth and sillyness made Alex Brown hit back to BRM allegations and he claims the British BSI did not do its job, didn't review ODF properly:

Fact is though, we (the team) did NOT read ODF - we merely made a rapid pass through parts of the text over half a day, looking for obvious problems. Even so, the UK generated by far the greatest number of NB comments. This fact tells you all you need to know about the degree of scrutiny ODF got in its JTC 1 ballot. If you believe it was studied in detail in the UK, you are very wrong. … We learned from our ODF mistake, and rectified our errors [with open xml].

Pamela Jones of Groklaw answers to his flamebait:

Now, as it happens, I have formed the impression that you and the the MS elves want to "interoperate" with ODF so Microsoft forces can take it over, since even you must now realize that OOXML will never work and will never be adopted.