Your contributor, along with many others, came up with the concepts of Amazon Marketplace, Wikipedia, and the iPhone, years before they became reality. His problem was that the technology was not in place when he did.

Business is less about having original ideas than it is about getting the timing right. There is nothing brilliant in itself about buying a share but buying it at precisely the right moment can make a fortune – and buying the same share for the same price an hour earlier or later can lose one.

Rupert Murdoch’s launch of The Sun on Sunday is a masterclass in timing. There was informed speculation that he would do such a thing within hours of his dramatic closure of his previous London Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, in response to the phone hacking scandal last July. Yet he did nothing. He knew that public outrage was genuine. A launch then would have been seen as cynical and arrogant. It would have flopped.

Since then, however, there has been a slight softening of the public mood. The sight of the 80-year old Mr Murdoch being attacked by a protestor in the British Parliament actually won him some sympathy – and positive admiration for his wife Wendi for the way she rushed to his defence.

The government’s decision to set up an inquiry into regulation of the press has prompted journalists, many of whom are virulently anti-Murdoch, to close ranks against the prospect of state control of a free press. Many were also offended at the heavy-handed way the police arrested some of Mr Murdoch’s employees. Irrespective of whether the arrests were merited, it seems that the Metropolitan Police cannot do anything these days without imitating the overkill they see on American cop shows. Journalists of all opinions could imagine men in helmets and flak-jackets stamping into the bedrooms of their own children.

Meanwhile, the police have admitted that the allegation that, more than any other, prompted the inquiry seems to be a fabrication. It was the now discredited claim that Mr Murdoch’s people had deleted the voicemails of a young murder victim that really stirred up popular anger. No one really cares about self-publicising “celebrities” whining about having their telephones tapped.

So the launch of the Sun on Sunday has been well-timed in the tactical sense – but is the whole concept well-timed at the strategic level? Many in Mr Murdoch’s own organisation, looking at the profits of Fox television franchises such as The Simpsons, see the old man’s obsession with print journalism as a thing of the past. It has certainly been a major distraction over the last year. The digital revolution has not yet killed newspapers outright, but, although there is still profit to be had from paper, the whole stressful experience may convince the next generation that there are better ways of spending their time.

The more experience you have of the world, the more you see how badly we are served by the mainstream media. The recent events in Egypt provide the perfect example. Instead of hard news, we are given endless “pieces to camera” so beloved of biased but ignorant journalists. Amid all the jabbering about “people power”, the plain fact of the matter is that a President with a definite –albeit flawed – constitutional and democratic mandate was driven out of office by an old-fashioned military coup.

Mainstream reporters are now cheering on inanely and indiscriminately anyone in the Arab world who looks like a demonstrator. They simply do not understand the difference between Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya.

Bahrain is a fairly civilised place, a well-established and generally benevolent monarchy, relatively free of corruption, and well-integrated into the global economy. By contrast, Yemen is a very corrupt socialist republic, medieval in its attitudes and economic development, and largely living in self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world. Libya was somewhere between the two – a Yemen that wants to be a Bahrain.

This blog tries to avid partisan political comment. The only question we allow ourselves to ask here is, “How does this impact on business?” This is not because we do no not care for anything except business. On the contrary, we care too much and do not want to bore business readers with our equivalent of those biased “pieces to camera” on non-business subjects.

So, strictly from the point of view of business, change can be good or bad, but disorder and the breakdown of established legal systems are usually bad for business. The situation in Egypt is uncertain, and business in general dislikes uncertainty (though there are always the lucky, savvy or fearless few who benefit). On the other hand, any change in Libya or Yemen will almost certainly be for the better.

Violence in Bahrain, however, is undoubtedly bad for business. The cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix is the most high-profile example of nervousness among international business interests, whose investments in Bahrain are as important to the local economy as they are to the global financial network: radical change will disrupt both.

Also undeniably bad for business is the British government’s abrupt cancellation of export licences to Bahrain. These were issued to firms who assumed, in good faith, that Bahrain was a friend of Britain. For the British government to pretend suddenly that they are opposed to the rulers they have recognised – and flattered – for decades is both hypocritical and short-sighted.