Well, you're right about one thing: I haven't really "Won" the argument with him. He's a bit of a stubborn guy (as am I), and until it really "clicks" for him,

Well, you're right about one thing: I haven't really "Won" the argument with him. He's a bit of a stubborn guy (as am I), and until it really "clicks" for him, I know hes not going to see the benefit. Since he isn't really a developer, and he isn't using these systems day in and day out, he doesn't have nearly as much of a chance to really understand the benefit; Which is why I finally just took the tone of a stern parent and told him he was going to wash his hands before dinner whether he liked it or not, and one day hed thank me. I honestly believe I'd be doing him a disservice to let him think it was ok to develop straight on the production machine, and that VCS just "got in the way", and so I'm happy to butt heads with him over this all day long. About your second point, what I meant there wasn't about how Mercurial worked, it was about what I had called the "missing leg" of the table: Continuous Integration. He was upset because, when developing live on the server, he immediately got to see his changes. Now, he had to commit them, then pull them down onto the server, and copy them into the deployment directory manually. To him, this is a complete waste of time. So had I set up some kind of CI solution by which new builds could be run automatically upon checkins, and a copy of the built artifacts deployed onto the server directly, we could have a test deployment that he could access and see changes almost instantly on, before moving the approved changes over to the main site (This is still very much a work in progress, and so the deployment site is little more than a test bed in and of itself right now). I feel if I had taken the time to set that up from the get-go, he would have had a much more positive reaction than to call VCS "needless overhead". He is also very much "anti-cloud", and the concept of storing our repository in BitBucket gave him hives. So all in all, he's completely out of his comfort zone with this project.