"Wake up, citizens! We need to put all our trust in X, because not-X is trying to destroy our country."

Without making any direct comparisons in other respects, Microsoft's arguments here are just as bad as those you would expect to hear from religious extremists or racist hatemongers: one-sided emotional half-truths designed to impress and convince those with a weak mind and no opinion of their own.

It is incredibly easy to write up a thing like this, as you demonstrated by the hilarious text in your automated form. If this is indeed all they have to counter the formal and well motivated decision from the NZ standards board, they must be truly desperate, and desperation does not really fit well into a standards process.

Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot here by making the argument be about the very need for an open standard as such. As usual the text somehow fails to mention that there already is an ISO standard which provides the desired level of openness and interoperability for office documents. You would have thought they knew, right? As with any emotional and lopsided argument, the counter-argument here is incredibly easy: attack their lopsidedness to demonstrate their lack of credibility. (Sort of like reading other parts of the Bible to Jehovas when they quote some carefully selected passages to you to support their view. That can be great fun.)

"What about ODF? That is an existing ISO standard for this purpose."
"ODF does not support the full feature set of MS Office applications."
"Of course it doesn't, you did not take part in its development, but ODF is extensible. What features are not supported, and what are the reasons that ODF can not be extended to support them if you join the existing ODF effort within OASIS, where you are already a member?"
"Um. We refuse to comment on that, as it is against our religion to speak of such matters."

http://it.gen.nz/ooxml/msnzopenletter.pdf

here is another template letter to lobby NBs and earn "ISO stamps" for your products ( feel free to use it )

http://holloway.co.nz/sincerity-generator/

:-)

(Link originally posted anonymously by another person in a different thread.)