Why Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard

Because he realized that it was not worth wasting his time there and unnecessarily making the prof's rich for taking a course which was of no use to him.

Most people join MBA courses to be a part of the cartel which gives them privileged access to the corpus of the colleges which are bloated by the exorbitant tution fees and the exorbitant donations given to them by people who get money easily(like the $100 m which Phil Knight gave to Stanford). They then use this money for their own ventures which are given chances to utilize the facilities of companies which belong to some of the parents of their classmates and even if the venture fails, the cartel of MBA puts them in some high post in some damn company where all they do is push their goals down the throats of their subordinates who are much smarter than them and threaten them with dire consequences if the goals are not met though they provide no guidance on how to reach those goals(like the boss in Dilbert - I would not be surprised if that guy were from Harvard). Remember the fedex ad - where the mba thinks that he should not do anything because he is an MBA? They hit the nail on the head with that ad.

Unfortunately, Bill Gates actually happened to be a guy who wanted to do something on his own instead of pushing targets down the throats of subordinates with no guidance of getting to those targets. And furthermore, he wanted to start a venture in this industry called Information Technology which was pretty non existent then. The only things in 1976 were the mainframe computers and IBM 390 PC's whose architecture was a closely guarded secret because of which IBM charged a huge premium making the PC's unaffordable for home usage. And of course, Apple was and continues to be overpriced, but still people buy iPod.

So naturally, given these circumstances, Bill Gates could not get his hands on the Stanford corpus and he realized that it was a waste of time to continue any further over there and he would be better off if he started off on his own without wasting time so that he did not lose the time window which was available for utilizing the opportunity which he felt existed at that time. And maybe he still feels that MBA is crap except for the connections it brings, which is probably why he heaps more praise on technical institutions than management institutions.

I have one simple question - has anyone ever seen a person start off in an MBA role and move to a technical role successfully? Like start off in marketing and then go on to become head of operations? Or start off in HR and go anywhere? I have seen the other way happen very often with lots of currently successful marketing people - and I know why it happens - because technical work is more difficult that MBA work like marketing, and anything is more difficult than HR.