Well they have a point here, You know red hat developed it self totally as a linux company and so slowly gained experience and effect to cater to increasing customers changing it shift from enterprise solutions and also diffrentiating its desktop comsumers with fedora. So it is nothing much of a challenge for microsoft rather than a big company selling linux as OS.
Whereas Novell is already a established company , they know market and they know consumers , so for them selling linux will definitely have some solid punch to support there product as a solution for people's problem (same thing microsoft used when it launched windows).
I'm not saying that red hat is anyway a less competent company, but my point is that when red hat started they had a view point of selling a safe , stable , secure OS to world and then developed there marketing and product presentation skills. whereas Novell as done its homework in this area and so ahs more chance of coming with tougher competion here.