Why Netcosm is not a product… yet.

Netcosm has recieved so much interest and response that people are wondering why we’re not offering this as a product or at least offering it as a demo.
The truth is, Netcosm is a cool piece of software developed in our research labs, and we wanted to show people some of the cool technologies we were working on. It was a research product, and we didn’t expect the amount of response it got. (Although we admit, we were really, really hoping…)
So if you call up our sales guys and ask for Netcosm, you’re going to get the stock response that Netcosm is a research project and is not for sale.
This is for a couple of reasons. While Netcosm is cool, we haven’t tested it much in real world situations. Sure, we’ve got it running on our network but we really aren’t prepared to sell a product when we can’t guarantee that it will work in our customers networks. It’s new code.
Secondly, we may have to recode the thing from the ground-up. Netcosm in its current form is really just a proof-of-concept. However, it requires some hardcore graphics hardware that is more likely to be found in consumer computers. And while the graphics are cool, displaying cubes, spheres, packets, and some simple smoke and fire, should not take nearly as much GPU power as it currently does. we’d like it to take less GPU power. We’ll probably We might have to switch out the backend graphic engine – maybe using an early version of DirectX or moving to OpenGL, or maybe even developing our own graphics system in-house.
Because we have so far to go before we can even begin to offer this as a beta version of a product, it would be unfair to customers to promise this to them as a future product.
So, are there any plans to release this as a product? Not at this time – not until we consider it good enough to even consider releasing it as a product.
But don’t think the interest has gone unnoticed.
[Editor's note: Corrections made to improve accuracy after receiving clarifications from Dr. Mike Johns.]