I think the complaint may be more about the location than the campus itself. Redmond, WA, is for all intents and purposes a Company Town.
It's pretty remote, and the entirety of the city revolves around a single employer. Everyone who works there either works directly for Microsoft or is closely affiliated with Microsoft business. Ditto everyone who lives there.
It's far from the nearest major city (Seattle), and to make matters a bit worse, there is a large natural barrier between the Company Town and the city (a huge lake in the way, with highly congestion-prone bridge crossings).
The negative side effects of this are too many to fully enumerate. Beyond the general boredom of living in a place where everyone works for the same company, there's also the issue of not having ready access to cultural events (which tend to be urban), the lack of proximity to competitors or indeed actual users of your products, etc.
Being outside of a major urban area is also limiting for employees in that there is substantially less choice in where you can live. Companies based in Seattle offer employees the full gamut of commuting options and accomodate both urban and suburban lifestyles thanks to the hub and spoke model of transportation. Being outside of a hub reduces the number of places that are within reasonable commuting distance.
I don't think this is entirely accurate. I used to live in Seattle, and my parents currently live in Redmond (about a mile from Microsoft), but virtually all of the people I know in that area have nothing to do with Microsoft. It's dominant to be sure, but not absolutely everyone is affiliated with them.
Plus it's not all that remote. It is a typically boring suburb with tract houses and squat apartment buildings punctuated by strip malls, but it is only 20-40 minutes from downtown Seattle (I've done the trip many many times). I think living in Seattle and commuting to Microsoft via the 545 is a reasonable commute. I used to do something similar when I lived in Green Lake and worked in Kirkland.
But don't get me wrong, I agree that locating a major company there instead of Seattle, or at least Bellevue, is a mistake. I just don't think calling it a remote company town is a fair characterization.
That's an exaggeration. While Seattle is painfully distant (painful really is the word for the 520 bridge) Bellevue is right next door. Bellevue is a city of 122k people, bigger than Ann Arbor. It's no great cultural center, but it's certainly more than just Microsoft people.
And unlike Ann Arbor it has neither the diverse industrial or academic base to provide for a diverse population. Bellevue is still largely an extension of Redmond, though admittedly not as thoroughly MSFT-dominated as Redmond proper thanks to some tech presence in Kirkland.
Bellevue can hope to have the diversity of Ann Arbor when they import a state school and a few cornerstone employers that aren't Microsoft or Microsoft-affiliates. I don't expect this to happen soon.
Hell, "Bel-Red" exists as a word for a reason.
In any case, I don't think my original point is at all an exaggeration. Redmond is a modern incarnation of a Company town, though it doesn't come with many of the stigmas of industrial company towns. Its proximity to Bellevue has meant the Microsoftification of Bellevue, rather than the diversification of Remond.
"The diversity of Ann Arbor"? The goalposts have fallen somewhere weird here. I don't particularly like San Francisco, but Ann Arbor is basically Noe Valley transplanted into central Michigan; that is, it's got the diversity and culture of one neighborhood of a real city.
