ThinkFree Office Better Wake Up

I have been dumbfounded by this issue for a few weeks now. Roughly a month ago, I emailed ThinkFree to inquire why in the heck it would be foolish enough to ask people to purchase its office products on an UNSECURED page. That is right kids, the company has its customers entering in credit card information that is, as far as I can see, completely unsecured.

http://bill.thinkfree.com/tfusa/product_cardpay_pre.php

From what I can tell, there is no sign of SSL anywhere on this page above. Yes, you must enter in other data before being able to enter, but if these folks are on crack enough to think that I am going to buy a product from a company that cannot even provide me with an SSL enabled checkout page, it must be living lush on the moon.

What pains me is that ThinkFree is, indeed, a better product than OpenOffice on a number of levels as it appears to provide better MS Office 2007 support in keeping formats true, editing documents made with MS Office 2007 and not hosing them, and so on. Yet at the same time, while I would sooner jump in front of a car than throw away money on Microsoft Office (lost keys, long story), I am really bothered by the fact that no one is calling this to the attention of the ThinkFree staff!

I will point out, again, that I did indeed try to contact the company — it never responded.

ThinkFree, you need to respond to this. If the payment page is, indeed, magically secured without SSL, then you damned well better explain how because what you are doing is wrong. At first I thought this was a temporary oversight; now I realize you simply have chosen not to bother paying attention. Here’s to hoping that will change…