Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle today.

Apple's Steve Jobs had some unusually nice things to say about Microsoft this week when announcing that the Redmond company's Bing search engine would be added as an option on the iPhone. "Microsoft has done a really nice job on this," the Apple CEO said, according to reports out of the Worldwide Developer Conference.

Of course, the burgeoning rivalry between Apple and Google probably had something to do with Jobs' enthusiasm for his longtime rival. But speaking in Seattle today at the SMX Advanced search conference, Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi made it clear that the Bing team and Apple are actually on the same page on a number of fronts.

Conference organizer Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land brought up the subject with a tongue-in-cheek question about the terms behind Bing's new iPhone search status: "Did you just have to write a big check to Steve Jobs for that, or promise to use iPads, or how's that work?"

Mehdi declined to disclose any business terms of the deal, citing a confidentiality agreement, but he spoke at length about the iPhone and Apple. Continue reading for excerpts from his remarks, portions of which will no doubt cause members of the company's Windows Phone team to cringe a bit.

The good thing about the partnership with Apple is it's been really a fantastic win-win. It started first with our iPhone app. One of the things that has been a natural fit for us is that, first of all, our vision for Bing is about helping to make decisions, about empowering people with knowledge, which is a little different than indexing the world's information. The key to that is you have to understand user intent. The signal of what do people want to accomplish is critical to us. And the mobile phone is a unique platform for us. You know more about the user, because people don't share phones a lot. You know location, you know speed of movement. You know a number of things that are going on. And so that allowed us to do a better job building the Bing product on the mobile phone than on the PC, in fact.

Second thing is, Bing has succeeded very well because we've bet on visuals. Whether it's our beautiful home page or what we've done with search, visual is what really has struck a chord with consumers, and where we've differentiated, and obviously on the iPhone you can take visual to a whole other level. So we started out with a great app, and the app has been a huge success on the iPhone, if people don't have it you should definitely download it. And it's been tops in their app store. And they've seen that. And we've had a lot of discussions and obviously they said, our customers are saying we'd like to try Bing, and choice is good for consumers, and we of course are interested in getting it out there.

It was a very easy discussion. One of the key things that we did is we did a lot of work on HTML5, which as Apple announced recently is a big focus for them, and we showed them so prototypes that we demoed at the Worldwide Developer Conference, and those really lit people up there, about all the things you can do with HTML5, and we're going to bring that into the market in the next number of months, we'll bring those features out. That's really the thing that struck Apple. They're a company that's about user experience, first and foremost, and I think it's a very nice compliment that they said, hey, we like what you're doing, let's work together.

In his comments at WWDC, Jobs also cited Microsoft's support of HTML5, the technology that Apple is promoting as an alternative to Adobe Flash. So in multiple ways here, it's good to know that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" philosophy is alive and well in the technology industry

Previously: Bing upgrades social search, adds Facebook links.