Nah, he was definitely talking about OOP I feel. I mean, specifically, he was pimping his product that he was launching, NeXT WebObjects which was just an application server for OO apps.
In 1996 most software was being developed in, hmm, C, C++, and Visual Basic 5. Java was just launching. Most web stuff was Perl or old fashioned C. VBScript (Classic ASP) was being developed.
One of the things that happened after Steve's infamous Xerox PARC visit, was that he saw Smalltalk, thought it was massively cool and declared that to be the way everyone should program. When he went on to found NeXT, they were pushing Objective-C, which is Smalltalk style message passing layered on top of C. (Trying to get the best of both worlds, though the combination is a bit awkward to me.)
In 1996 most software was being developed in, hmm, C, C++, and Visual Basic 5. Java was just launching. Most web stuff was Perl or old fashioned C. VBScript (Classic ASP) was being developed.