Excel is dominant because it runs on Windows and is supplied with MS Office.
Many people would be fine to use other spreadsheet software but why bother going through the bother of researching and downloading and learning that software when your company probably has Excel licences and you've got some entry level training that used Excel?
That dominance has other effects. There is a huge amoun of support (training courses; books; Usenet groups and forums; Magazine articles; other people in the office; etc) for Excel that don't translate immediately to Excel. There are very many third party tools to help you do stuff in Excel if you really need it to. And Excel is probably some people's first introduction to programming. (Which is perhaps a bit scary.)
I speak as someone who loves gnumeric and LibreOffice btw.