Bill Gates: Having the required Knowledge is more important than College Degree

I see lot of posts on facebook about Mr. Bill Gates dropout from college and then comparing themselves to Bill Gates on not having a degree. Being a fan of Bill Gates, I thought to write a small post on why one can't just compare themselves to Bill Gates on dropout without the necessary achievement.

Bill Gates who reluctantly dropped out of the college once said "Unlike some students, I loved college. However, I felt the window of opportunity to start a Software company might not open again"

Some Educational background of Bill Gates (from Wikipedia ):

Mr. Gates graduated from Lakeside School, WA in 1973. He was a very bright student scoring 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and got enrolled at Harvard College 1973.  In 1975 Gates, in his sophomore year, devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent. His solution was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.

Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the school's computers. Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen, and he joined him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974. The following year saw the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company. Gates dropped out of Harvard at this time. He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a company

Conclusion:
So, Bill gates didn't dropout the college because he couldn't complete it. He saw an opportunity to open his own company. He must have also felt that he had sufficient knowledge to run the company and he was not required to complete the college.  If we dropout of the college because we have the specialized knowledge that is not required by going to college, only then its fair to compare our self to Gates dropout. But if we don't have a degree just because we couldn't get into the college or we couldn't pass or we don't have interest in studying then comparing one to Gates is just not right.

And finally, yes, I agree that a person not having a degree can have more knowledge and can achieve more that the one having a degree like in case of Henry Ford. Unfortunately one can not prove that just by talking but has to back it by achieving.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Gates,_Sr.