> There are companies where algorithms are not commodities

And there is an entire industry! Embedded (but not the Raspberry-pi kind of embedded that is similar to desktop).

Try to do a dead reckoning system, or anything related to real-time gesture/motion analysis. Try reading, processing, mixing and outputting audio in real time. Or any DSP related stuff. What about FPGA, ASICs, etc.?

Why oh why is the embedded industry so easily forgotten? It's not all cloud, food apps, SaaS and Electron, ya know?

Edit to add: all the above with the limited resources of embedded, that forces you to improve your algorithms.