You make a great point about engineering. The interaction of algorithms/techniques and the database, as well as computational infrastructure and UI/UX, are all significant areas of differentiation. I still disagree about algorithms themselves as a differentiator -- everyone has access to excellent shortest path algorithms already. Other geospatial optimizations (scheduling, circuits, flows, etc) are a different story; as represented by the many scientific disciplines that pursue those problems: operations research, graph theory, network science, location science, etc.