"They need to be more like Samsung to swarm the market with various devices and see which one sticks"
The only problem with that is that they will piss off the OEMs that sell Windows machines and they will jump ship wholesale to Android, but if you sell a single unit of a certain spec then people will either buy a Windows machine or they won't. If they buy a Windows machine then if they buy a Surface then fine, if they buy an Acer, Samsung, Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo, etcetcetc then they will still get capitalisation of OS and the appropriate license fees. Sales of Surface may be low, but how many "Windows" tablets of any manufacturer have been sold and this will give a more accurate reflection of market penetration. Same applies to Android, people are not working on a level playing field when they say "Android" it appears they only refer to total numbers as some sort of generic manufacturer, but really they should break those numbers down to how many were made by Samsung, Acer, etc - then you will see how "bad" Microsoft sales of Surface are rather than poking fun at low figures taken totally out of context. It is an excellent piece of engineering and is well worth the money, but bad marketing and not a small amount of the "black arts" from competitors has blown any negative points way out of proportion.