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Actually, what made Gates rich was not what he learned at Harvard. Instead, he decided to write an operating system and a programming language(BASIC) that was user friendly, unlike the IBM OS2, which was light years ahead of DOS and Windows, yet remained extremely user-unfriendly. He was a business man, not a genius engineer. He does have a very good vision however, and knows how to play his cards, while at the same time, knowing enough technical stuff that he's not just some snobby chairman, but actually sit down with low level developers.
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<p>You are right in that Gates' success had nothing to do with his (incomplete) Harvard education, but it also had nothing really to do with user-friendliness per-se. Like all other successful business men he "saw his opportunities and he took them". Gates is definitely a brilliant man, but his engineering skills are debatable. Altair BASIC was a very simple 8080 assembly language program and MSDOS was actually just a stripped-down clone of CP/M that was written by somebody else (Gates bought QDOS from soembody else and renamed it MSDOS). OS/2 came some years later and was quite userfriendly, but failed because Microsoft pulled out of the joint OS/2 project between IBM and Microsoft and started their own project (Windows NT), and due to their existing hold on the market, they were able to wipe out OS/2 with propaganda and advertisements. Off the subject, I know, but I like to argue about computer stuff :). Interestingly enough, Gates' businessman views actually brought him in to conflict with the hackers at Berkeley and MIT during the late 70s and early 80s.</p>
<p>Anyway, I would choose MIT for the great enviornment, but either one would be a great choice I'm sure.</p>