  The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international
partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the
Republic of Chile, is the largest astronomical project in existence. While
ALMA's capabilities are ramping up, Early Science observations have started.
The ALMA Archive is at the center of the operations of the telescope array and
is designed to manage the 200 TB of data that will be taken each year, once the
observatory is in full operations. We briefly describe design principles. The
second part of this paper focuses on how astronomy is likely to evolve as the
amount and complexity of data taken grows. We argue that in the future
observatories will compete for astronomers to work with their data, that
observatories will have to reorient themselves to from providing good data only
to providing an excellent end-to-end user-experience with all its implications,
that science-grade data-reduction pipelines will become an integral part of the
design of a new observatory or instrument and that all this evolution will have
a deep impact on how astronomers will do science. We show how ALMA's design
principles are in line with this paradigm.
