Even if you are in Mountain View, say you have friends in San Jose; how often do you see them? Its really not that different.

I think you have a very poor understanding of the pudget sound area economy. On the west side, you are just as likely to run into someone working for a startup, Starbucks, or Boeing, or UW, than Amazon. Amazon isn't that dominating. Now, in the east side, Microsoft is bigger, but there are still a lot of other companies, eBay, Google (on both east and west sides, and even in freaking Bothell now), a bunch of startups. Its not quite the monoculture you make it out to be!

Now, when we are talking about Bellevue, you compare it to San Jose, not San Francisco, or Fort Worth, not Dallas, or some weird industrial wasteland suburb of New Orleans (of which there are plenty), not the wards or the French Quarter. All of these interesting cities have their souless mostly-shopping mall areas. Looking international, what I've seen the same nearby satallite cities of Tokyo, Paris, Bangkok, Amsterdam, Lausanne, etc...tells me suburban blight is not just an American problem.