True innovation requires hard math and CS.

Take Shazaam for example, who built an empire on audio data indexing/search, sound recognition = numerical analysis + probabilities + statistics + search algorithms + a lot of knowledge about systems architecture, distributed systems, databases etc.

Of course you can build products a la 37signals but is a lot more to software than that (and also note that 37 guys are not code monkeys/script kiddies/you-name-it, they actually know lots about CS - sample here: https://github.com/rails/acts_as_nested_set/blob/master /lib/active_record/acts/nested_set.rb )

At some point in your career you'll want to: write a parser, search a graph, optimize some storage thingie ...

Epilogue:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...