MIKE NICHOLS has a poster on his office wall. It shows the young Muhammad Ali glaring down at a fallen Sonny Liston, the bruising heavyweight who had seemed invincible — until Ali beat him, in 1964, in one of the biggest upsets in sports history, and then beat him again a year later.
“The triumphant underdog,” Mr. Nichols says, nodding toward the wall.
The inspirational fight poster is fitting, because Mr. Nichols, a general manager at Microsoft, is a lieutenant in an underdog corporate army here. Its daunting mission is to take on the Google juggernaut
|