Well, a service-oriented architecture is a more general category then microservices and has been around much longer. In many cases it is much more justifiable on technical grounds. Just to give one example. You have an API that is not the most stable thing in the world and when it misbehaves you do not want it to take the whole application down with it. So you put it in a separate service that can easily be restarted. That is a good technical reason for a separation of executables. Problems arise when people introduce these separations for no good reason. Then one gets all of the problems of RPC and none of the benefits. I.e., one is making things more complicated for no good reason.
