you very much can have partnerships without a full release. All the competitors have prototypes, so they can have contracts ready for when the full release comes out
That's a flawed practice that will soon become a thing from the past. To this day one of the major competitors for example doesn't even support the use of GPUs in their network and will not support them for the next 1-2 years. They just hadn't planned for that initially...
Completely agree, im also confident sonm will prevail as the best and most versatile supercomputer in the market but golem and iexec and such all have partnerships already planned as well