Agreed. As you can see from the image at the top, the "city" they built is a sprawling mess of buildings quite far from the city (Seattle, in the background). Depending on your team, you may need to frequently take Shuttle Connect to get to meetings, or walk a mile or more. If you live within walking distance from campus, you'll be dependent on a car for everything else. There's just endless cookie cutter suburbia around there.
Don't most large software companies have a 'campus' feel to their headquarters? I would imagine back in the 80's when they were designed/created, nobody wanted to go work inside a towering, souless, black glass skyscraper for 10 hours a day.
A lot of people would kill for a view of water and trees and the ability to walk outside at lunch.
You have clearly never been to the Microsoft campus. There's trees and green everywhere, and parking, for the most part, is in a parking building or underneath the buildings. There's actually very little overground non-enclosed parking.
Hell, even the photo itself doesn't have that much exposed concrete apart from the buildings themselves. You can clearly see that there's a lot of greenery surrounding buildings.
I was looking at the pictures on the site. The first image and the fifth. The fifth, specifically, makes Microsoft's campus look like a dime-a-dozen corporate/suburban landscape.
Granted the images don't show any parking structures or buildings that appear to have integrated structures. So it's quite possible the images aren't representative of the build-out you're referring to.
And, aside from the ballpark, the 'greenery' surrounding the buildings is exactly the sort of glorified berm I'm talking about: that's hardly functional greenery. It's better than none, but far less desirable than a proper park with functional spaces for laying out, taking walks, playing frisbee or catch, etc.
Kudos to Microsoft for having the ballpark though, and more is due, if it's one of several such spaces. The rest of the campus though, as characterized in those pictures, does not look great.
