While Microsoft’s Surface tablets are getting more use per device in the business world, their share of the market is still incredibly low. Recent numbers from Chita show both the scale of the problem that Microsoft has to address, but also illustrate the strength of Redmond’s own hardware.

The peak time for tablet usage in North America peaks at 9pm Eastern. The three major tablet platforms (Apple’s iPad, the Microsoft Surface, and the generic ‘Android tablet’ catch all) have a similar usage pattern, with web traffic volumes highest in the evening. During the working day (primarily noon till 5pm) tablets are consuming around 60% of that peak traffic.

The interesting point here is that while the ‘shape’ of usage is broadly the same, a Microsoft Surface is used proportionally more during working hours, an iPad is used more during the morning commute, while an Android tablets become the top performing device later in the evening.

That says to me that the primary use case of each breed of tablet as a whole is broadly similar, although each family has their own strength. For Apple it’s on the move and helping people through the commute, for Android it looks to be use by the night owls, and Microsoft has parlayed their traditional enterprise strength to the Surface.

Of course there are some caveats here. Surveys such as Chitika’s can show broad intentions of a group, but individual cases are not as easily highlighted. The survey is also based on data gathered from mobile ad impressions which will skew the results, and if you take the volume of devices into account, Apple’s iPad generates five times the ad impressions of Android, while the Surface’s share of the ad impressions doesn’t even break five percent.

Highlighting the Surface numbers, it’s clear that Microsoft’s targeting of the device as a business and enterprise machine has been successful. Now they need to work on the volume of sales.